Kurosawa at his grandest

Rating: 10/10 (4 October 2000)

Ran means chaos in Japanese. Instead of taking the story of King Lear and focusing on the central character as that title does, Kurosawa has chosen to name his film after its setting: a world of chaos unleashed by the pride and ignorance of a former warlord. Discovering what it is to be human, while hurtling around in a universe without rules or borders, is a theme that Kurosawa loved. You can find it most accessibly in Andrei Konchalovsky's film Runaway Train, based on a Kurosawa screenplay. The strength that evil has, if we allow it; the futility of so many things in which people believe; the redeeming power of love: these meant as much to Shakespeare in King Lear as they do to Kurosawa in Ran. Yet there is great beauty here - most of it associated with the pomp and circumstance of battling armies, and most of it belied by the violence they do. The background, the universe in which Lord Hidemoto scuttles like a proud, crippled, spider, is blank; brown and grey in colour, but bereft of landmark. Just as, after Shakespeare's Act I, Lear never sets foot in a building; just as Ahab and Ishmael, having left Nantucket, never set foot upon land; so Hidemoto is cast out into darkness. Music, costume, cast, battle action: so good it's hard to remember you're watching a foreign film. This is film-making at its grandest and most universal. Thank the bold Frenchman, Serge Silberman, who financed it when nobody else would, for one of the great films by one of the great directors.