Masterpiece: arguably Kurosawa's best

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2009)

"He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened." - Tao Te Ching
"Ran" begins with a gorgeous sequence, director Akira Kurosawa treating us to several shots of soldiers on horseback, perched like gargoyles on a series of grassy hills. We assume these men are guarding the borders of some ancient Japanese kingdom, but it turns out they're running security escort for King Hidetora, an elderly warlord who is out hunting with his three sons.
The film then quickly becomes a loose retelling of Shakespeare's "King Lear", Hidetora announcing his retirement and then proceeding to divide his kingdom equally between his three sons. In true Shakespearean fashion, Hidetora then stands back and watches with sadness as his spawn squabble and wage war, each interested in acquiring more power and respect than the other.
But "Ran" is not simply a three-way battle between sons. One of the things that becomes apparent with repeated viewings are the subtle power plays being made behind the family. For example, rival warlords form alliances with the three brothers in an attempt to instigate battles between them, and the wife of one brother, Lady Kaede, moves like a serpent, constantly plotting against the King and his sons.
Initially we sympathises with King Hidetora. After all, the poor guy loses his family and is forced to watch helplessly as his empire crumbles! But gradually we learn more and more about Hidetora's past; Kurosawa reveals that Hidetora was himself once a ruthless warlord who destroyed kingdoms and killed thousands. By the film's end we've thus witnessed a grand cycle being reset. Hidetora built his empire through violence and bloodshed and lost it likewise, one ruthless King essentially falling whilst another rises to take his place.
So "Ran", which means "chaos" in Japanese, is less about King Hidetora's personal tragedy than it is about human tragedy on a much larger, more cosmic scale. Observe how Kurosawa uses various distancing techniques (he frequently cuts away to shots of cloud filled skies) in an attempt to convey the feeling that we are watching these characters and their petty squabbles from the heavens. With shades of Jancso ("The Red and White") and Kubrick ("Paths of Glory", the sublime "Lyndon"), Kurosawa's camera grants us the vantage point of enlightened Gods.
Interestngly, "Ran's" aesthetic style is completely different to much of Kurosawa's early work. Kurosawa's pace is slow, his camera rarely moves, close-up shots are rare, the film's acting is stylized and mannered (drawing from Japanese Noh theatre, though perhaps also Brecht?) and characters are held at a distance. Most find this grating - none of the ingratiating of say, a David Lean epic - but this is a more mature, deeper and less imitable Kurosawa. Whilst his earlier features have been imitated to death, perhaps to the point where they have lost some of their power, "Ran" remains sublime.
Gone also are the usual Kurosawan moral platitudes. There is little preaching here, and few of the trite moral lessons and dips into sentimentality that mar many of Kurosawa's early films. Indeed, it seems that Kurosawa only matured into a "serious" artist in the years leading up to and after his failed suicide attempt. He achieved a sort of gerotranscendence with his later films, shifting to a more transcendent vision of the world. These films thus have a very holistic view of time and space, life and death, moving away from ego-centricism to a more cosmic world-view. Perhaps such an artistic shift was spurred on by Kurosawa's own existential crisis in the early 70s.
King Hidetora himself achieves gerotranscendence after a failed suicide. It is then that he stumbles upon a blind man who was once the victim of his past savagery. Forced to directly confront his past, his self image no longer based on illusions of heroism and glory, Hidetora promptly becomes a tormented spirit. Kurosawa has him wear a white face mask from this point onwards, tearing across the landscape like a ghost.
"Ran" ends with a powerful sequence. An army marches in the foreground whilst, far in the distance, a blind man walks dangerously close to a cliff's edge, tentatively tapping away at the earth with his walking cane. The man's walking cane then hits open air, he stumbles slightly and the film abruptly ends. Kurosawa's point is clear: humanity is blind, perpetually on the verge of tumbling down some dark abyss. But note too how the blind man is elevated, far above the army down below. He may risk falling, but he, unlike most in the film, has begun his long climb back toward virtue.
"Ran" is packed with similar, cleanly drawn "metaphors", though at times Kurosawa's dialogue is ridiculously direct. Entire sequences of the film spell out Kurosawa's themes, character dialogue signposting the director's moral messages at every turn. It's all at times very hokey (subtler in Japanese?).
Needless to say, Kurosawa's compositions and use of colour are dazzling. At times the film seems like a series of landscape paintings and the master's soundtrack is also fairly experimental.
Note to younger viewers, preconceptions in tow: there are no "cool" samurai battles here, only a melancholic battle sequence which Kurosawa shoots without sound. Such sequences are nightmarish rather than gratuitous, Kurosawa balking at the horror that other directors salivate over. "Ran's" stylized acting also takes some getting used to, requiring several viewings to fully absorb the film's various character motivations, traits, names, nuances and faces. One character, a copy of the court jester in "King Lear", is particularly annoying until we properly tune in to his role. Like Shakespeare's jester, he exists outside the story, designed to comment on man's follies.
9.5/10 - Despite some heavy-handed dialogue, this is arguably Kurosawa's best film, and one which rewards (or gets richer with) repeat viewings, something few films genuinely do.