Kurosawa paints a colourful oil on canvas

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2007)

The combination of excellent cinema and Kurosawa isn't anything new. In Ran (chaos), he paints his own vision of one of Shakespeare's finest works, 'King Lear'. 'Ran' looks more like an oil painting rather than 'water coloured'. While in 'water' paintings, the colour's are fading, in oil, the colours have a stronger presence signifying their message. He uses various colours to tone the depth of his characters and the relationship between them, to present the mood of the setting and to tell his story.
With very brilliantly sophisticated sound effects he brings a raw feel while effectively using the background score in parts. Using his artistic technique, he pays close attention to detail in almost every scene (e.g. the wind, the makeup) without worrying about limiting his final piece to a usual 1.5 hour movie or whether the pace is fast or slow. Of course there must have been some editing but everything in the final piece flows beautifully, revealing a story of love, honour, betrayal, misunderstanding, lust, murder, jealousy, manipulation, greed, madness, redemption, forgiveness and destruction.
Tatsuya Nakadai breathes Lord Hidetora Ichimonji. He had starred in many of Kurosawa's films and in 'Ran' he is absolutely a stunner. This is more than an example of great acting because he made me completely forget that I was looking at an actor. Another noteworthy performance is Mieko Harada's as the venomous Lady Kaede. She displays the power of her manipulation and evil intent through her body language while her words are secondary.
Immense additional credit must also be given to Kurosawa for skilfully mingling a Shakespearean tragedy into a traditional Japanese historical epic. Clearly he'd done his research well and put a lot of hard work into his painting. The background is signified with much of the Japanese cultures and religious reference.
I won't give much of a synopsis as you'll find them in other comments and those who've read King Lear may have an idea. All I'll say that this movie is for those who appreciate real cinema. It is not what others will call 'everyone's cup of tea'. It does make you reflect to the real world how one's expression can be misinterpreted, how life itself is not a happy ending, how dangerous trusting the wrong person can be and how important it is to trust the right person (even a family member), how greed can eat up a person, how the consequences of our actions dictate whether the mistake we made is significant or trivial and how naïve we all are.