Ran

Ran is ostensibly a variation on King Lear, and possibly the greatest film adaptation of the Bard’s play. But it isn’t hard to see Kurosawa empathetically viewing his Lear, here called Lord Ichimonji, as a cipher for his own troubled twenty year existence in Japanese culture.

Kurosawa’s golden period was between 1950 and 1965, beginning with Rashomon and ending with Red Beard, and after that he fell upon hard times. Changing viewpoints in Japanese cultural and artistic identity found him slavish to Western techniques and a relic of an older filmmaking sensibility. Between 1970 and 1993 he made only seven films. Funding was particularly hard to come by and it took him a decade to assemble the funds for Ran.

So when we see the Lord Ichimonji’s fall from a plane of unassailable power to desperation and wandering in the wilderness, it isn’t hard to imagine Kurosawa feeling the same way. But it isn’t just the fall from grace and descent into uncertainty, at the time of filming, Kurosawa was 75, and Ran features a main character who is ready to step back from the main line of power and ruling, but isn’t about to settle out to pasture. Ichimonji is assessing his legacy, and it's easy to see this towering master of cinema doing much of the same and filling in a bit of autobiography in the sympathy we ultimately feel for the mad warlord.

This sense of autobiography merges with King Lear to produce a heightened epic variation of the story. Lear was already a grand tragedy, the destruction of a household by interior greed and an unquenchable thirst for power, and Ran finds a way to up the stakes even more.

In broad strokes the stories are very much the same, but in finite details things have been changed, characters cut or merged, and another owes more to a character out of Macbeth than anyone in Lear. Both tell the story of an elderly monarch distributing the wealth and lands to his three children, the banishment of the youngest child who loves him enough to speak out against his questionable decision-making, the fighting which not only tears the kingdom apart but sees the destruction of the family, and the monarch’s descent into madness as the he aimlessly wanders the lands seeing the decay that his pride, arrogance and power brought about.

Lear goes mad because he realizes too late that the only child who loved him questioned him, and he banished her away. Ran features that element of the story, but Ichimonji’s madness has more to do with the realization that his three sons are going to destroy each other in order to gain the most power/land. As a man who spent his entire life going out and conquering what he wanted, he has now begun to get karmic retribution for his sins and arrogance.

The acting is solid across the board, and by and large, played fairly straight. The two notable exceptions to this rule are Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Ichimonji and Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede. Tatsuya Nakadai begins his performance in a more controlled and realistic manner, but once his character begins a descent into madness it takes on a more highly theatrical and Noh-like manner. His face becomes heavily painted to resemble a chalky living-ghost appearance and his gestures become grander and he throws himself about violently. It could dip easily into overacting, but somehow both Nakadai and Kurosawa manage to anchor it enough in the grand scheme of the film to make it work seamlessly. The fall of his character is so great, the ultimate devastation of his house and legacy so sweeping, that a highly theatrical manner of acting works.

The best performance belongs to Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede, a snake in the lotus flower if there ever was one. She’s more Lady Macbeth than anything else, and Harada makes the most of her limited screen-time. I saw this film and figured she was nominated or had won several arms full of awards, but she was empty-handed. I consider this one of the great injustices of the 1985 awards season. The scene where she seduces her brother-in-law alone is both utterly transfixing and terrifying. She uses every trick in her arsenal to get him to conform to her will-power. Not only sex, which she does use, but a hysterical fake crying fit in which she is so bored by own forced emotions that she distracts herself which squashing a bug instead. Lady Kaede is a by-product of Ichimonji’s careless war-mongering, and she has had a lifetime to fester her wounds and plan her revenge – it is she who sets up the annihilation of the household and meets her death with acceptance that her goal has been accomplished.

Kurosawa’s directorial eye was frequently grandiose in films like Seven Samurai or Throne of Blood, and this film is no different. The battle scenes, of which there are many, are filmed from a god’s-eye perspective, steadily observing the violence and bloodshed with no cuts to spare us some of the gorier details – a quick scene of a soldier holding his own cut-off arm lingers in the imagination as its treated as a small detail in a sweeping camera movement across the remains of a battle.

And the costumes are where most of the color comes from as the landscape is frequently a barren vista, monochromatic castle interiors or a scorched battlefield. The costumes appear drunk on color and textures, emotionally coded to the character’s state or nature, they make the film more grand by simply being the garments draped across this band of miserable characters.

Shakespeare is a malleable artist, and it’s a commonly held belief that every generation gets a Shakespearean adaptation that it deserves – the 40s had Olivier’s veddy British, atmospheric Hamlet, 60s had the romantic, doomed, youthful Romeo and Juliet, and the 80s got this masterpiece in which a powerful man gets knocked asunder by the sins of his greed.