"Barren of loyalty and feeling"

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2011)

Akira Kurosawa is renowned both in the west and at home as one of the world's finest filmmakers, in large part thanks to his many historical pictures. Made towards the end of his career, Ran is the last in a long line of Kurosawa features set amid the chaos of Japan's feudal past. But this time around there are none of the downtrodden samurai and gnarly-toothed peasants so familiar from his 1950s classics. Ran is not an intimate human portrait as Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress were. This is a vast epic of battles and warlords, the bloody historical backdrop against which those earlier, small-scale stories would have taken place.
Kurosawa himself was now in a very different phase in his career. He keeps the camera back from the action, a cold and objective eye. His however is still very much a cinema based around movement, rhythm and tone. Take the opening shots over which the credits are played, picture-postcard tableaux of horsemen, the occasional turn of a head or flick of a tail the only thing to tell these are not stills. Set to the haunting whistle of a Japanese reed flute, it's a perfectionist evocation of the calm before the storm. Throughout the picture staging, pacing, colour and sound are all precisely tuned to the needs of the scene. Often a shot will be held for longer than strictly necessary purely for the sake of rhythmic balance (Kurosawa did his own editing). But it's not all about aesthetics. Some of the artier looking shots also serve to give the story more depth, such as the attention-grabbing close-up of the helmet when Kaede seduces Jiro, which visually corresponds to Hidetora's grass "crown" in the following scene, the comparison between the two reminding us how great the shift in power has been.
The acting in Ran is as much a matter of stylisation as the direction. Taking inspiration from Noh (a Japanese theatre tradition comparable to opera) lead man Tatsuya Nakadai makes exaggerated gesture of even the most normal action, for example wiping his fingers clean with military snap after signing the document that relinquishes his power. It's not a realistic or emotive way of performing but it fits in with the tone of the whole piece. And as with a stage production, the focus here is much more on figures than faces. Of the other cast members Mieko Harada is particularly good as Lady Kaede. She has a wonderful wavering voice like one of the reed flutes prevalent in the score, and is deeply expressive. It's great fun to see the exuberant stage performer Peter playing the fool, and also Hitoshi Ueki (Lord Fujimaki), a popular comic actor who seems to me like a Japanese Clive Swift.
For all its stylistic precision, Ran can make for difficult viewing, not because of its length or cultural barriers, but because of its utter bleakness. It is not just in scope that it differs from the Kurosawa pictures of previous decades, it also foregoes the heart and humanism that made those earlier affairs so affecting. Ran is one of the most aesthetically beautiful films ever made, and is certainly a powerful commentary on the war-torn chaos of the twentieth century, but it seems slightly sad that Kurosawa has rejected making an emotional connection with his audience.