Ran
Epic Drama • 162 Minutes • Japan • 31 May 1985
Director: Akira Kurosawa • Written by: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide • Produced by: Katsumi Furukawa, Masato Hara, Serge Silberman • Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Mansai Nomura, Hisashi Igawa, Peter, Masayuki Yui, Jun Tazaki, Hitoshi Ueki • Cinematography: Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda, Asakazu Nakai • Edited by: Akira Kurosawa • Music by: Tōru Takemitsu
In flattened perspective four warriors splay across the screen. For a moment as the opening credits roll listing Akira Kurosawa as the film’s director and hailing his various collaborators – including producers and cinematographers plus Ishirō Honda who is mentioned for his help with the mise-en-scène – we might think that we are witnessing a photograph or even an illustration, only for the third of the four warriors on horseback and the only one who has hitherto been facing the audience to turn his head and drift too in watchful contemplation of his surrounds.
More warriors on horseback, deftly poising their bows and arrows while blending neatly into the lush green landscape, gaze out watchfully in their assorted twos and threes, a tableau of silence which is punctured by a wild boar who waddles not only right towards the camera but into the path of the waiting hunters, who now barrel in unison over the crest of the hill. They set up a lavish camp and toast the man and the arrow which felled the boar, but the meat is inedible according to the vanquishing lord Hidetora Ichimonji, who says that the animal was old and ‘his hide is tough: it stinks’.
Lord Hidetora is flanked on one side by his three sons and two members of their retinue, including a loyal advisor named Tango, while on the other side his vassals Ayabe and Fujimaki seek to marry into the Ichimonji family by wedding their daughters to Hidetora’s youngest son. The ageing lord however has been contemplating another matter, and promptly announces that he has decided to hand over the reigns of power to his eldest son Taro, with Jiro and Saburo taking the second and third most prominent castles in his dominion while Hidetora himself will remain with a smaller retinue at the first castle alongside Taro, stressing that the family must continue to operate as one.
This is the setup for Ran, the Rashomon and Seven Samurai director Akira Kurosawa’s late-career epic which contains some of the most breathtaking and memorable shots in all of cinema, like the meeting atop a steep hill between the exiled Saburo and Tango and a wily Fujimaki where the two parties almost drift into the aether, the entry of Hidetora and his retinue into the second castle, slender but still proud, and the flaming building which provides the backdrop after a momentous battle at the third castle, with Jiro and his general Kurogane watching on as Hidetora hobbles out of the castle gates, his ashen face bearing an expression of bewilderment and grief but also grim recognition which will endure for the rest of the film.
At the same time if Kurosawa’s reputation for bold dynamism and his fondness for samurai tales particularly from the Sengoku period suggest sleek swordplay and other kinetic energies, in truth his works especially in terms of characterisation tend to be earthy and nubby, like Vincent van Gogh’s early painting The Potato Eaters even though Ran – which is deliberately ponderous for its first hour – is imbued with a startlingly rich colour palette where mustard yellows and scarlet reds and azure blues compete with the verdant foliage and barren grey vistas. His figures are almost too crude and compromised to be mere types while they attain a kind of stylised grandeur only through extreme hardship.
Kurosawa struck upon the idea for Ran while reading about the life of the sixteenth-century daimyō or feudal lord Mōri Motonari, a crafty strategist who through a mixture of warfare and diplomacy eventually grew his power to encompass much of the Chūgoku region. He is best remembered today for the legend of the three arrows, an apocryphal but characteristic parable in which he is claimed to have given each of his three sons an arrow to break, before sagely pointing out that three arrows bundled as one are tougher to crack in a paean for unity which continues to resonate. The parable features wholesale in Ran though the headstrong Saburo breaks the three sheathed arrows over his knee while assailing his father’s succession plans, curtly dismissing familial bonds as he describes a world ‘barren of loyalty and feeling’ and a younger generation of which he is a part long ‘weaned on strife and chaos’.
Forged in the smithy of the Sengoku period with its civil strife and bloody violence, with this setting in mind Kurosawa would eventually schematise his film around Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, in which an ageing ruler likewise divvies up his land only to be left an itinerant wanderer on the cusp of madness. Lear and his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia correlate with Hidetora and his sons Taro, Jiro and Saburo with Ayabe and Fujikami as the Duke of Burgundy and King of France while Tango and the impish Kyoami take the parts of Kent and the Fool. This would be the director’s third and final take on Shakespeare following Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well, which respectively followed the examples of Macbeth and Hamlet.
Pillow shots of cumulonimbus clouds, billowing and darkening, add to the sense of precipitation or foreboding or heedlessness while the gleaming visage of the Amitābha Buddha also splits a few scenes, gazing on whether in a spirit of distant hope or blithe indifference. The film bristles with the sounds of birdsong and insects and wind through rushes while the battle sequences make the most of Tōru Takemitsu’s probing and at times elegiac score. Together with the colourful costumes and lean interiors – with the inner chambers of the first castle defined by their lacquered gold and stripy blinds – Ran proves both lavish and ramshackle while the action flaps like an ensign, as though beating its fists against impervious time.
The ladies Kaede and Sue – wives of Taro and Jiro though their own families, once rivals to Hidetora, were decimated as he used brutal tactics to win control of the land – occupy two poles with Sue treating the past with a certain meekness and forbearance while Kaede scarcely masks her bitterness, almost seething with a desire for vengeance. Mieko Harada as Kaede delivers a bravura performance, searing herself on the mind of the viewer just as her coiled sensuality and brusque schemes win over Taro and Jiro in turn. Driving much of the film’s action, Kaede’s eyes gleam with a strange delight as like a vortex she sucks the other characters to their shared plight, but while it trades in themes of female rage and righteousness in the end Ran is at its heart a family drama.
‘I have tales to tell’ is the admonition between generations. Beyond heaven and the gods, the benefactions of a smiling Buddha or internecine strife and fiery denouements, Ran deals with more humble and human foibles around our aspirations and role models, family ties and the inevitable process of ageing which might sneak up on us then suddenly leer from every side like through the cracked glass of a mirror. The old man Hidetora thinks he has something left to teach his children, but their retort condemns him for his failures and flaws while demanding – however costly it might prove and even at the point of a sword – the boundless capacity to make the same errors.
