Many people discover Akira Kurosawa's work via the great Seven Samurai (1954),
a movie rightfully considered one of the most influential ever made and
a prototype for the modern action blockbuster. It has been remade in
countless forms in the ensuing decades and its inspiration is evident
in any ensemble blockbuster you care to mention.
Much of its appeal comes from its ballsy, freewheeling tone, idolising
its samurai heroes and their bloody retribution against villainous
bandits. It's a film by a young director at the height of his
popularity, having a great time dreaming up the Japanese equivalent to a
boy's own adventure.
Some thirty years later, Kurosawa was out in the cold, shunned by a film
industry back home which saw him as out of touch
with contemporary Japanese audiences, his work was deemed too expensive
and risky at the box office. It was only through collaboration with
foreign financiers, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola,
that Kurosawa was able to continue making movies. Though he enjoyed
success and critical acclaim during this period, the Japanese film
industry continued to overlook him. As he grew older, the enthusiastic
outlook of the young director of Seven Samurai morphed into a
bleak pessimism, yet out of this darkness came not only Kurosawa's
magnum opus, but what I consider one of the greatest works of art ever
created: Ran (1985).
Where Seven Samurai is about growth, honour and violence as noble endeavour, Ran
sees a world contaminated with death and moral decay, where the human
race has set itself down a path of self-destruction without thinking to
look back. This contamination affects every facet of existence, from the
son inheriting the cruelty and treachery of his father; a wife
manipulating her husband into war out of her lust for power and
vengeance; a once feared King driven to madness by the realisation of
the irreparable damage his reign was responsible for; the suffering of
the good people caught in the midst of feuds between the powerful
nobility; last of all, the Gods watching the destruction from the
heavens and doing nothing.
In a running time twenty minutes shorter than Avengers Endgame,
Kurosawa manages to give every character a story of their own,
individually examining the movie's central themes on a different social
or spiritual level. As a piece of writing, it does not have a single
unnecessary scene or character from beginning to end. Each storyline
carries an equal share of the thematic and narrative work, with every
action yielding a bigger picture consequence building towards humanity's
inevitable downfall.
The story shares much in common with Shakespeare's most multi-faceted play, King Lear,
in which an narcissistic monarch is humiliated and driven mad after
handing his kingdom over to his two manipulative daughters and
disinheriting the one who truly loved him. As his land is torn apart by
war and political scavenging, Lear is forced to accept the depth of his
folly.
Ran's essential premise is similar, but where Lear's undoing
is the result of arrogance and short-sightedness, the fate of
Kurosawa's King Hidetora (played with raw, unhinged intensity from
behind Noh makeup by Tatsuya Nakadai) is the result of his tyrannical
past and the values that reign passed onto the sons, Taro and Jiro, to whom he bequeaths
power. Where Shakespeare's play is self-contained, Ran's plot is backed up by characters with long and ignoble histories.
When I watched Ran, my knowledge of Kurosawa was rudimentary at best: I had seen a couple of his movies (Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood and Ikiru), but was ignorant of his personal history. One of the many things which makes
the film so astonishing is how, the more you learn about the director
and Japanese culture, the greater depths are revealed. Ran is magnificent no matter your entry level, but its pleasures grow in proportion to your knowledge.
In the movie's most iconic scene, King Hidetora takes refuge in an
abandoned castle. Taro and Jiro's armies subsequently attack,
slaughtering Hidetora's personal bodyguard. Horrified by his sons'
actions and unable to commit seppuku due to a broken sword, Hidetora
wanders out into the battlefield, his white robes and pale face
contrasting with the blazing battlements behind him and scorched earth
beneath his feet. Rather than murder him, the soldiers watch in silent
awe as their former king wanders out into the wilderness. The scene wordlessly conveys much about the impermanence of
status and the illusion of power. In Japanese mythology, it was believed a
king's ghost could be seen leaving his castle after death, a small
detail in no way vital to feeling the scene's impact, but adding so much
to the psychology of how it plays out and the story's nihilistic
religious underpinnings.
The scene's visual splendour is far from isolated: Ran
has Kurosawa at his most artistically fearless, using colour and
framing to inform his themes (setting in conflict the greens of nature,
the whites of the spiritual and the divine, and the black and red of
man's violent nature) with a control over his craft not yet acquired by
the brash young director behind his earlier pictures. Anyone who has
seen the movie will not be surprised to learn Kurosawa spent a decade
planning each shot in painted storyboards, swapping out the tightly shot
realism of his black and white work for the bold composition and
heightened colour of an Impressionist painting in motion. If the movie's
themes are bleak and harsh, the cinematography (accompanied by Tōru Takemitsu's strikingly
otherworldly score) both cushions the blow and reinforces it as a
reminder of the beauty being torn apart by human madness.
The movie is so rich and densely textured that essays could be
written about the meaning of individual shots or characters: Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada, in a performance as terrifyingly unhinged as her eyebrows)
and Lady Sué as emblematic of the ruination of femininity in a
male-dominated world; how the human race uses the assumed existence of
gods to justify acts of savagery, adding another layer to the motif of
moral corruption bleeding down hierarchies... talking of plots and
subplots feels almost redundant. There are stories to be found
everywhere, each as meaningful in its own way as the ones taking place
directly in front of the camera.
For me, sitting down as a teenager to watch it on a
cheap television in a boarding school common room, Ran opened my eyes and mind to
the majestic heights cinema could achieve under the limitless artistry
of an old man looking through his camera at a world so much darker than
he remembered it from his youth. The title
translates into Japanese as 'chaos', and just as that describes the
nature of the universe, so too does it describe the nature of Ran.
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