Ran

Ran takes viewers to a place they would rather not explore on their own. In a world of cruelty, Kurasowa has shown how the moments within the horror can have beauty. Shakespeare wrote King Lear as a mirror on the human condition. We do not have to be kings and princesses to identify with the father's desire for the well being of his children, even if his own life was one of cruelty and pain. We see this theme throughout great literature and film. What Ran has done is to provide the viewer with many small moments within the pain to realize the beauty. Even the moment of epiphany for Hidetora, when his actions achieve his madness, is one of surpassing beauty. As the storm rages outside the small house of the prince he blinded, whose parents he killed, whose sister he forcibly married off, the simple sounds of the flute provide an intense focus on the here and now. It is at this moment when Hidetora recognizes that he himself sowed the seeds of his own destruction. There is no dialogue, no swashbuckling, just the terrible beauty of the music. As with many of Kurasowa's films, despite their epic scope, it is the small paint strokes that make up the master's canvas.

What a wonderfully varied medium film can be! Here we have a film that is both truly great and in a different way a clumsy mistake.

By now you know that this was made by a master filmmaker at the end of his life -- in preparation for ten years and Asia's most expensive film. He intended it to be his last, his masterpiece.

The Good: This work of art is a sequence of masterfully composed images. The camera remains stationary or virtually so, and each scene is richly rewarding in all the visual dimensions, including motion. The costumes are the most cinematic I have seen. There is a use of grasshopper sounds that is the best example I know of amplifying an image by sound. The frame of the picture is the landscape -- little takes place indoors, and that action always refers to some larger, exterior motion. In my experience, this is the best complement of Wells' Othello, the most masterful use of interior space I know.

I give it a ten because it is a masterpiece in this area of cinematic communication, one that seems exceptionally underaddressed.

The Bad: The Master attempted too much in trying to match his cinematic virtuosity by swallowing Shakespeare's Lear to produce an equally rich story. In this he fails -- so many problems here. First, Shakespeare wrote plays for a barren stage where the images grow from the mind, supported by super-rich language and interwoven visual metaphor. The scene grows from our understanding of the character and what that character says. Kurosawa tries it backwards here by placing characters is a vast scheme that came from his own mind, off-screen as it were, and it doesn't quite work.

As it happens, Ran's emphasis is on grand motion. Little time is spent on character development, except with the scheming wife of the first son (a story element that has little Shakespearean counterpart). Lear is a play about demons and leaves the question open as to how many are from opportunistic devilment and which are internally generated. All this is discarded here, as well as the Gloucester counterplot. Among the great losses from the source are the continuous examinations of what sight means and what it can conceive. How fertile that would have been as dramatic scaffolding for Kurosawa's vision.

There's a problem with language as well. Not knowing Japanese, I cannot judge how rich or intricate in metaphor is the film's dialogue. But the sound and dramatic utility of the speech is about as far from Shakespeare as you can get. Shakespeare uses his actors' speech to simultaneously move the dramatic action and to serve as a surrogate for the viewer's mind. Both the story and your own ruminations on the story are contained therein. This depends on a continuous, predictable assumed rythmic base which is articulated by a rich consonant based, cheating rubato. Japanese consists of staccato vowels that I suspect are overly dramatized in the short blasts we get from these characters. Could hardly be more unShakespearean. I assume there is a Noh legacy being mined here instead, which is not available to this western viewer.

A side note: after seeing these battle scenes you'll never appreciate Speilberg's blatant ripoff in the first part of Sgt Ryan.

Based on Shakespeare's King Lear, this film follows the story of the aging warlord Hidetora who, in an attempt to restore peace, divides his kingdom between his three sons - Taro, Jiro, and Saburo - and retires from his duties. However, one of his sons sees this as unwise and is banished by his father, leaving his two brothers in charge of two of the three castles left in their hands. It isn't long before they are overtaken by greed and eventually betray their father, leaving him in the hands of a philosophical jester and a loyal retainer. This betrayal ultimately leads to war, dividing the family and driving Hidetora insane.

The remarkable script, which contains many of my favorite lines from any film, still manages to break its way through the confinement of subtitles and reveals itself to be one of the richest Kurosawa ever wrote. He has obviously worked equally hard on the look and feel of the film - the cinematography being excellent (example: the long, continuous shot of Saburo's men charging on horseback across a river).

There's also something rather frightening about it that I can't quite put my finger on. The first battle, which is the film's turning point, is the most horrifying, yet strangely beautiful, battles ever filmed. A good effect used is the loss of sound, with only Toru Takemitsu's haunting score to be heard. The entire battle lasts less than ten minutes and there is no uplifting or bombastic music to be heard, but in my opinion, it's Ran's finest scene, and thus the finest scene ever.

What Kurosawa managed to get rather than give though was excellent performances from his actors, none more brilliant than Tatsuya Nakadai's Hidetora, Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede (a woman similar to Lady Macbeth but with a different hidden agenda), and the strangely-named Peter as Kyoami.

'Ran' is the Japanese word for chaos, riot, dissension. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece is indeed a feast of destruction and perdition, charged with symbols and powerful in pictures like it is found very rarely in today's cinema.

The dusky story is based on Shakespeare's 'King Lear'. In the film a Japanese warlord celebrates his own downfall. Kurosawa devised this with a radical film language which works with certain imageries of colors, rapid cut sequences and a sophisticated sound design. When the colorful flags of the different armies get intermixed in a battle, when the peacefully quiet wind (which carries the soundtrack) swells to a raving storm or when long wide shots suddenly segue into shots of details that follow hot on each other's heels then you realize Kurosawa's incredible style which deeply influenced the cinema worldwide.

The drawings of the characters are equally terrific. Hidetora's jester is for a certain reason always at the side of the warlord. Their relationship alters as the film continues: Jester and warlord change their roles which makes it hard to distinguish both. Just as the sky turns from blue to grey with dark clouds, the violent past of Hidetora is catching up the aging lord. His trail of murder and predation is not forgotten, the brutally conquered land still carries the old scarves of war and exploitation which now burst out again.

The viewer can take this monumental work as a warning to the destructive power of war, which is even decades later at present and beset those who seed the violence.

The 'Kurosawa' adaptation of King Lear in his film 'Ran' is a tremendous memorable film.

It is a very dramatic film with many soliloquies and dialogue, but if you are patient with it, you are treated to some of the most epic scenes of cinematic brilliance that Kurosawa made. After all it is Shakespeare and one must be patient with it if they are not a fan of the old school theatre.

Colourfull clashing armies, The lord awaiting his fate in a burning castle, a brilliant execution scene (I consider the BEST I have ever seen film ever), and the blind being left in the hands of Buddha?

While Seven Samurai will always be his perfection, Ran is more than an enjoyable movie that should be seen. Just stick with it and you'll never forget it.

Rating 9 out of 10.