SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending.
Akira Kurosawa often liked to draw on western literature for his material – Dostoevsky for The Idiot (1951), Gorky for The Lower Depths (1957), even thriller writer Ed McBain for High and Low (1963). This was one reason he was sometimes accused, in his native country, of making ‘westernised’ cinema. But above all he repeatedly returned to Shakespeare – and the great Shakespearean tragedies in particular. Throne of Blood (1957) reimagines Macbeth as a chilling samurai drama, strongly influenced by the conventions of Noh theatre. Hamlet migrates into the corrupt executive world of modern Japan in The Bad Sleep Well (1960). And for the last great film of his career, Kurosawa chose King Lear, relocating it in the same key historical period as Seven Samurai – the tormented 16th century, when Japan was torn apart by the conflicts of rival warlords.
Lear becomes the ageing Lord Hidetora Ichimonji, who decides to abdicate power and split his realm between his three sons – since in this patriarchal society, no daughter could ever think to inherit. But even so Kurosawa gives us a lethal woman as his Goneril equivalent – Lady Kaede, wife of Hidetora’s eldest son Taro and lover of his second son Jiro. Close kin to Asaji, the Lady Macbeth figure in Throne of Blood, Kaede manipulates her far weaker menfolk to work out her long-nurtured scheme of vengeance against the entire Ichimonji clan.
‘We… are children of this age, weaned on strife and chaos,’ Hidetora’s youngest son Saburo warns his father, vainly trying to deflect him from his disastrous plan. ‘Ran’ means ‘turmoil’ or ‘chaos’, and chaos is what Kurosawa unleashes across the full expanse of his Scope screen – but meticulously orchestrated chaos, as castles burn, colour-coded armies bearing windruffled banners wheel and clash, and images of death and desolation overwhelm the senses.
The film moves at a stately pace, and occasionally you may find yourself yearning for the light-footed, zip-panned action of Yojimbo (1961) or Seven Samurai (1954). But although the 74-year-old director’s eyesight was starting to fail, his painterly instinct for visual composition was still unsurpassed, and his use of the Japanese landscape – from rolling wooded hills and lush meadows to the slate-grey, barren slopes of Mount Fuji – compels the eye.
As Hidetora, Tatsuya Nakadai (Mifune’s nemesis in Yojimbo and Sanjuro) builds on his dual lead performance from Kurosawa’s previous film Kagemusha (1980) – we get the ageing warlord’s arrogance and stubbornness but also his fatal naivety. But this is an ensemble piece – it’s not the tragedy of one old man but the catastrophe and destruction of a whole society – and the entire cast are note-perfect, not least Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede and Shinnosuke Ikehata (a wellk-nown transvestite who acts under the name of Pîtâ) as Hidetora’s fool Kyoami. His tenderness towards the mad old man, tempered by bouts of exasperation, is at once funny and moving.
Vittorio Dalle Ore, only 24 at the time, acted as one of the production’s several assistant directors. He landed the job through a Japanese cousin, but spoke no Japanese himself and had to learn fast. He was struck by the way everyone in the crew mucked in, with nobody standing on status. The chief electrician and the art director willingly helped with cutting grass. ‘The atmosphere was wonderful,’ he recalled. ‘Everyone would help everyone else, giving last touches to the sets, polishing floors and pillars, ageing the costumes for all the extras.’ Even the septuagenarian director himself would join in and contribute to these mundane tasks.
Kurosawa, Dalle Ore found, believed in extremely long rehearsals, over weeks or months, but then would often shoot even the most complex scenes in a single take. ‘It would be one take, rarely more than two, and then “Thank you!” and that was it. He’d drawn these very detailed paintings, which was his way to think about the themes and develop the characters. So he knew just what he wanted.’
Kurosawa had had plenty of time to decide. Ran was ten years in preparation while the veteran moviemaker, spurned by the Japanese studios as too extravagant, was forced to scrabble for funding. It wasn’t until the maverick French producer Serge Silberman (who had supported Buñuel) came to his rescue, finding backing and chipping in some of his own money, that production could start. To some extent you can see why the studios were running scared. Kurosawa never believed in cutting corners, and Ran was at the time the most expensive Japanese production ever undertaken. It took two years to prepare the handmade costumes; most of the 200 horses were specially imported from the US; and the huge castle on the slopes of Mount Fuji was constructed complete and to scale before being burned to the ground as Hidetora’s two elder sons attack their beleaguered father.
Of all Kurosawa’s films, Ran is the bleakest and most pessimistic, set as it is in a world of treachery and slaughter – a world, as Saburo says, ‘that is barren of loyalty and feeling’. His verdict is echoed at the end of the film, when both he and Hidetora lie dead, by the loyal samurai Tango (the Kent figure). ‘It is the gods that weep,’ Tango declares, when the Fool berates the seemingly callous deities. ‘They can’t save us from ourselves… Men prefer sorrow to joy, suffering to peace.’ For although Kurosawa sticks largely to the plot of King Lear, he diverges from Shakespeare in one crucial aspect: while the play tells us little of Lear’s past, in the film we learn how Hidetora gained and held on to power through the infliction of cruelty and suffering, often on the innocent, and it’s these cruelties that come back, karma-like, to destroy him and his sons.
Something of Kurosawa’s personal life may have fed into the film’s pessimism; while it was in preparation, his wife of 40 years, Yôko Yaguchi, contracted cancer, and she died during the shoot. The film’s final image is one of utter desolation: a blind man (himself one of Hidetora’s victims as a child) teetering helplessly on the edge of a precipice, the protective image of Lord Buddha falling from his hand; this, Kurosawa seems to be telling us, is the epitome of the human condition. But despite the grimness of its theme, Dalle Ore recalls that Ran ‘wasn’t at all a depressing film to make. It was so intense and concentrated’.
And the massive expenditure paid off spectacularly, as can be seen in this handsome 4K digital transfer. Ran never looks anything short of magnificent, and the battle scenes stir the senses and the soul. The sound transfer makes the most of Kurosawa’s meticulously detailed sound effects – banners snapping in the wind, horses’ hooves thundering across the terrain, flames tearing at sundering wood, the shuffle and scuttle of phalanxes of footsoldiers manoeuvring into position, Lady Kaede’s silken kimono sliding across the polished wooden floor. Toru Takemitsu’s plangent score, strongly influenced – at Kurosawa’s suggestion – by the symphonies of Mahler as much as by the music of Noh theatre, comes across with untrammelled emotional impact, not least in the final funeral march for Hidetora and Saburo.
Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound, June 2016
RAN
Director: Akira Kurosawa
©/Production Company: Greenwich Film Production
Production Companies: Herald Ace, Nippon Herald Films
Executive Producer: Katsumi Furukawa
Producers: Serge Silberman, Masato Hara
Production Co-ordinator: Hisao Kurosawa
Production Manager: Ully Pickardt
Production Administrators: Satoru Izeki, Seikichi Iizumi, Teruyo Nogami
Collaborating Production Administrator: Takashi Ohashi
Production Assistants: Masahiko Kumada, Ko Nanri
Directorial Consultant: Ishiro Honda
Assistant Directors: Fumiaki Okada, Bernard Cohn, Takashi Koizumi, Ichirô Yamamoto, Okihiro Yoneda, Kyoko Watanabe, Vittorio Dalle Ore, Kunio Nozaki
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide
Based on the play King Lear by: William Shakespeare *
Directors of Photography: Takao Saito, Masaharu Ueda
Collaborating Photographer: Asakazu Nakai
Assistant Photographers: Yoshinori Sekiguchi, Noboru Asono, Kiyoshi Anzai, Satoru Suzuki, Shigeo Suzuki, Mazakazu Oka, Kosuke Matsushima, Hidero Igarashi, Nobuyuki Kito
Lighting: Takeharu Sano
Stills Photography: Daisaburo Harada, Yoshio Sato
Editor: Akira Kurosawa *
Production Designers: Yoshiro Muraki, Shinobu Muraki
Set Decorators: Tsuneo Shimura, Osami Tonsho, Mitsuyuki Kimura, Jiro Hirai, Yasuyoshi Ototake
Wardrobe Design: Emi Wada
Make-up: Yamada Katsura, Tameyuki Aimi, Chihako Naito, Noriko Takamizawa, Shohichiro Ueda
Hair: Yoshiko Matsumoto, Noriko Sato
Titles: Den Film Effect, Films Michel François
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Music Performed by: Sapporo Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Hiroyuki Iwaki
Sound Recording: Fumio Yanoguchi, Shotaro Yoshida
Sound Re-recording: Claude Villand
Battle Consultants: Koichi Hito, Ryu Kuze
Kyogen Master: Mansaku Nomura
Armature Props: Masamori Minami
Publicity: Benjamin Baltimore
Cast
Tatsuya Nakadai (Lord Hidetora Ichimonji)
Akira Terao (Taro Takatora Ichimonji)
Jinpachi Nezu (Jiro Masatora Ichimonji)
Daisuke Ryu (Saburo Naotora Ichimonji)
Mieko Harada (Lady Kaede)
Yoshiko Miyazaki (Lady Sue)
Kazuo Kato (Kageyu Ikoma)
Pîtâ (Kyoami)
Hitoshi Ueki (Nobuhiro Fujimaki)
Jun Tazaki (Seiji Ayabe)
Norio Matsui (Shumenosuke Ogura)
Hisashi Igawa (Shuri Kurogane)
Kenji Kodama (Samon Shirane)
Toshiya Ito (Mondo Naganuma)
Takeshi Kato (Koyata Hatakeyama)
Takeshi Nomura (Tsurumaru)
Masayuki Yui (Tango Hirayama)
Heihachiro Suzuki (Fujimaki’s general)
Reiko Nanjo, Sawako Kochi (Hidetora’s concubines)
Haruko Togo (Kaede’s old lady)
Tokie Kanda, Kumeko Otowa (Sue’s ladies-in-waiting)
France-Japan 1985©
162 mins
Digital 4K
*Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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