Film and poetry.

Rating: 10/10 (4 March 2002)

I'd like to say, firstly, that I don't generally trust "visually stunning" films. There are a lot of movies that rely on grand special effects, bright lights, and tricksy cinematography to dazzle us past the fact that in the words of Gertrude Stein, "There's no 'there' there." (Or as David Mamet put it: "But what is it in aid of?") Ridley Scott, for instance, you can have. Granted, his movies look spiffing, but a fog machine doth not a catharsis make.
Kurosawa's visuals, of course, are famous, and often imitated, and here and there in his films he has fallen somewhat into the same trap-- but only here and there. Not so in "Ran."
"Ran" may be the closest thing to pure poetry I have seen on the screen-- you can almost hear the cadences of the recitation. I don't trust spectacle, but in "Ran" the spectacle is informed with wrenching emotion, and a terrifying weight-- it's the only great tragedy of the screen, the only one that lets you feel the size of tragedy. For once visuals are not just a magic show or window dressing-- in the absence of Shakespeare's language we have Kurosawa's images, and it is no small thing to say in the light of this that "Ran" is the greatest Shakespearean adaptation for the screen. Why this should be I don't know, but perhaps it took an old man-- Kurosawa, his sight failing, entering the realm of darkness, with a heavy disillusionment with the world to give force to his age, to get at the heart of Shakespeare's play: a mammoth, brooding anger at the sins of the world.
Shakespeare, luckily, got through this period to a craggy sense of redemption in his final plays. It's a pity Kurosawa never got to "The Tempest."