Kurosawa Twilight

Rating: 8/10 (8 January 2003)

Ran is the most melancholy epic ever made. Knowing the context in which it was made only adds to that sense, but is hardly indispensable. It is the last classic Japanese samurai epic of the 20th century, and the last great film by a filmmaker who overshadowed most of his contemporaries.
Adapting Shakespeare's King Lear to Medieval Japan and changing daughters to sons, Ran opens with an aging warlord (Kurosawa regular Tatsuya Nakadai) dividing his power among his sons, only to watch them sulk away. Intending to spend his twilight years visiting each in turn, he instead witnesses the slow disintegration of everything he has created and a vicious fraternal war.
The 70s were a very rough time for Kurosawa, with the debacle of his first color and independent picture, attempted suicide and very slow rehabilitation. In this time he made only the Russian Dersu Ouzala, a fine film, but one that stands apart from his other work. He also devised the story of Ran, an impossible-to-finance behemoth of a picture at a time when Japanese filmmaking was evolving towards smaller, nimbler, and safer ventures. As the prospect of ever making Ran grew ever fainter, he set his sights on a smaller film to serve as a dress-rehearsal of sorts: Kagemusha.
It took foreign financing, courtesy of his first generation of successful fans - George Lucas and Francis Coppola - to get that made, to great international acclaim. It also helped Kurosawa rebuild his confidence and throw himself at Ran with countless paintings and years of preparation behind him.
If you've never seen anything by Kurosawa, or, worse yet, if you've only seen his earlier masterpieces Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, Ran might cause a bit of a shock at first. Those other films were the work of a master in his prime, confident, playful and extremely dynamic. Ran is a much more static, fatalistic an poised film, the product not just of a decade of storyboarding, but of a grim sense of doom born from Kurosawa's experience and the play he chose as his inspiration. That said, never has the cruel indifference of fate been so artfully depicted on a screen.
The battle scenes are few, but haunting in their grim relentlessness. With his endless flows of colorful, authentically-armored soldiers, Kurosawa paints war scenes that manage to be both incredibly convincing and otherworldly at the same time. It conveys a sense of being a ghost, forced to witness the last hours of a dying world, something no other film has managed before or since.
You will marvel at the mastery on display, but your enjoyment will depend on whether you can overcome the near-crushing pessimism on display. I struggled with that at the very end, and consequently cannot rate this as highly as his other films I mentioned. Nevertheless, Ran deserves deserves every bit of praise thrown at it.
Watch it and decide for yourself.