alongside the utterly brilliant "Seven Samurai", "Ran" defines Akira Kurosawa as one of the true masters of the art of film-making

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2010)

To anybody who is in love with the art of film-making, Akira Kurosawa is a favorite name. Throughout his unfortunately not-so-successful (financially) career, he made a string of remarkable pictures that changed cinema overseas rather than in his own country. But what many people miss, I think, is how varied he was in his talents and tastes, and the way he dipped the tone of his pictures from one end of his career to the other. Look at his early pictures such as "Yojimbo", which more or less glorified violence and then look at his later ones such as the marvelously artistic "Kagemusha" and "Ran," in which there is no atmospheric similarity.
"Ran" is loosely based on the Shakespeare classic "King Lear," which I have had the pleasure to read. Combining elements of the play with some Japanese legends and myths, Kurosawa weaved a terrific story that not only exposed violence as harrowing and gut-wrenching, but made us ask a question: "Why do human beings kill each other?" The answer was not definitive, but it was clear: for petty reasons. In the picture, an aging tyrant (Tatsuya Nakadai) divides his kingdom amongst his three ambitious sons and the two corrupt ones turn against him. Banished by his own flesh and blood, the tyrant is forced to live like an animal in the wilderness while his one noble son attempts to save him, and along the way, looses his wits and comes to terms with the horrible things that he did to gain his kingdom.
There's a substantial different between King Lear and Lord Hidetora. Lear, as far as we know, was innocent and not worthy of having his daughters turn against him. Hidetora, by contrast, deserves it. Instead of retiring peacefully, he sees the monster that he was in youth. And what's brilliant is that Kurosawa decides not to flash back and show us the horrible things he did, the kingdoms he burned, but to tell us through other characters and see Hidetora react to them. The key character in this is Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), wife of one of Hidetora's sons, who is so cold-blooded and vicious that she makes Lady Macbeth seem as pleasant as the girl nextdoor. Harada is utterly brilliant as this vengeful psychopath, who is worked into one of the screen's most detestable villains. Every time she appears on screen, the audience (and the scene) grows silent, waiting in fear of what she's about to do. She's like a cobra, gliding along with his silk gown dragging behind her, hissing, posed to strike at any time. Her key to her viciousness is not witty dialogue (though she has that) but her silence.
And the violence theme. Kurosawa painted a field red with blood in the climax of "Kagemusha," but as he put it, "Kagemusha" was a dress rehearsable in comparison to "Ran." It's not just that Kurosawa paints the sets with blood, but that he makes it look horrible and frightening and dehumanizing. He exposes it as it is. And he reminds us that this is all for a petty reason. Hidetora murdered and pilaged to expand his territory so he could own more. Now he watches his sons murder before him, so they can spite him. There's a famous scene where Kurosawa shows a bloody massacre and shuts off all sound except for a music. It's like watching a silent movie and it has twice the impact it would have had had Kurosawa decided to mix in gunshots and screams and killings. Some of the killings look more like accidents on the set: so well-done that they look as though they couldn't have been simulated. The montage is gruesome and deliberately exacerbated with one chilling killing after another and not one bit of it is glorified or even cannily familiar to what Kurosawa had shown in "Yojimbo," which though a fantastic picture, was child's play compared to "Ran."
"Ran" is not only a strong picture in its morality and story and theme, but it's also a professionally-made one with Kurosawa at his peak form. The movie looks beautiful with gorgeous cinematography. Kurosawa shot most of the movie in wide-angle, with very few close-ups, even in emotional ones. In my opinion, he did this to show as much of the landscape as possible, perhaps to remind us that all of this was happening because of the land these people are spilling blood over.
There is so much I want to say about "Ran," unfortunately I have a 1000-word limit on IMDb, so I have to cut it short. But I think my point is made. "Ran" is one of the milestones of cinema, and perhaps Kurosawa's most impacting picture and one of his very best. Even in his seventies, going blind, and without much financial backing, he made a heck of a movie.