It's about time.
[music]
Ran. Akira Kurosawa's last masterpiece.
A film as beautiful as it is bleak.
Ran. A single word, a single syllable, translated from the Japanese as—
"Ran"
I swear to God.
Okay, according to Wiktionary it means
chaos, or uprising, or revolt, confused, disturbed;
and this film is all that and more.
But Kurosawa controls his chaos,
drawing on forty years of directing experience and his background as a painter.
Late in his life, he took to painting his storyboards,
giving his late work some of the most stirring visuals of his career.
Particularly in his use of color;
big, bold, primary colors, helping the viewer 'read' the chaos as it unfolds.
Huge swarms of brightly-hued soldiers crashing into each other.
Like in this breathtaking sequence, where two armies consume a castle,
the yellow and red of their banners doubling the flames.
The three armies are commanded by three brothers:
Taro, the eldest in yellow;
Jiro, in red; and the youngest, Saburo, in blue.
They are the sons of an old warlord, Hidetora Ichimonji.
This is, of course, based on the tale of another old king who split his lands between his three children.
Nope, not that one.
Story time
In 16th-century Chūgoku, in western Japan,
aging daimyō Mōri Motonari gathered his three sons.
He gave each a single arrow
and he told each to break one, and each did.
Then the old daimyō took three arrows and bound them together.
But this time, none of the sons could break the three arrows at once.
The sons learned a valuable lesson.
Each son individually was weak,
but bound together as a unit they would be strong.
Short story, I know, but it's a popular parable in Japan.
One that Kurosawa knew well.
And like Mōri, Hidetora imparts the same lesson to his sons,
played beat for beat in this film.
But Kurosawa wondered, how strong could those arrows be?
Enter Shakespeare.
I know it's taken me a while to get to Shakespeare,
but that's because Kurosawa essentially took the same route.
Ran was originally a subversion of the legend of Mōri
and only after several rewrites it managed to dovetail into a loose retelling of King Lear.
Even Kurosawa never quite understood how he stumbled upon it.
He'd done Shakespeare before in his previous films,
The Bad Sleep Well and Throne of Blood, which I talked about last year,
but those adaptations were tighter
and closer to the Shakespeare than Ran is to Lear.
In this adaptation, roles aren't dropped,
but they are split and merged in rather interesting ways.
William Shakespeare's King Lear is, in part, the story of two fathers—
Lear, of course, but also Gloucester,
father of Edgar and his bastard son Edmund.
Both men are essentially good, if foolish,
and despite that they both father good and evil.
And both pay for the evil they create.
But Hidetora Ichimonji is not Lear.
That is, he's not just foolish, he's deadly.
He is decidedly not, as Lear calls himself, a man more sinned against than sinning.
Hidetora spent his life in conquest
and we see the places he's destroyed and the lives he's ruined.
One life being Lady Kaede.
She's roughly analogous to Lear's Edmund,
though she doesn't want power; she wants revenge.
Listening to her, there's a sense that Hidetora deserves his fate, and he knows it.
I cannot help myself.
But even before that, Hidetora expects to be hated.
He has a sense of the evil he's brought to this world.
Kurosawa's always been cynical, but here his pessimism reaches a cosmic scale.
Between his sweeping shots of armies, Kurosawa intercuts scenes of the sky, often to frightening effect.
The weather becomes a measure for the state of the world itself.
In this film, Kurosawa is shooting from a god's-eye view.
A god who, more than likely, isn't there.
Now, there's a key scene from the play that I want to discuss.
Act 4, Scene 6.
The Earl of Gloucester, blinded by Regan,
is found by Edgar, his legitimate son, though he doesn't know it's him.
He asks this supposed stranger to take him to the cliffs of Dover, so he can end it all.
Edgar, taking kindness on his father, decides to cure his despair by toying with it.
He takes his father to a flat plain and tells him it's the cliffs of Dover.
And so Gloucester, in his despair, turns his eyes skyward and renounces the gods
and he falls forward.
And of course, he lives.
And Edgar is right there beside him,
telling him what a miracle it is that he survived that great fall.
It's a strange scene.
A very strange scene.
And it's easy to play it as comic, but it's an important scene nonetheless.
Kurosawa was clearly moved by this scene, because he does it twice.
The first to leap is Hidetora himself, with a real cliff this time.
The other Gloucester is Tsurumaru, first mistaken for a woman,
blinded, another victim of Hidetora.
Another theme of this film is masculine pride and the havoc wreaked on feminine spheres.
Tsurumaru doesn't fall, but instead he gets the most poignant gesture
in this last, shocking, final scene.
He drops the Buddha, the last thing protecting him, in the gorge.
And the film ends with a blind man on a cliff, abandoned by the gods.
Kurosawa had lost many old collaborators during this time.
Takashi Shimura, his longtime lead actor, died in 1982.
Fumio Yamaguchi, his sound technician since the 1940s, collapsed on set and died shortly thereafter.
And most tragically, Yōko Yaguchi, his wife of thirty-nine years, died during shooting.
Knowing that about the production, there's a profound sense of finality to this film.
Like he was gathering his friends for one final journey.
Among them were his lead, Tatsuya Nakadai, who, in his youth,
played fearsome, sexual young villains for Kurosawa and others.
Here, he plays a man whose life was spent at the sword
and sees the world he created die by the sword.
Also among them was Hideo Oguni, his co-writer,
who helped him write the Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Ikiru, and The Hidden Fortress—masterpieces, all.
And on a fascinating footnote in film history, Kurosawa's assistant director on this film was Ishirô Honda,
who catapulted to fame by directing Japan's most famous fable about fears of a nuclear age.
There's a deeper connection here.
Kurosawa once said in an interview that nuclear apocalypse was on his mind during this time.
It was something he would later explore more explicitly in his film Dreams.
And since this was post-Hiroshima Japan and, more importantly, the mid-1980s,
at a hot point in the Cold War, apocalypse was on everyone's mind.
Maybe I owe Godard an apology.
Shakespeare never could have conceived of an apocalypse,
at least, not in the way we can conceive it,
with environmental or nuclear disaster a very frighteningly plausible reality.
But Lear comes close.
In his other tragedies, someone always takes the throne.
In Hamlet, it's Fortinbras; in Macbeth, it's Malcolm; in Titus Andronicus, it's Lucius.
But in Lear?
It's not so clear cut.
Once Lear dies of a broken heart,
the Duke of Albany asks Kent and Edgar to rule together, and Kent refuses.
Edgar, in most versions, says nothing.
There's no clear assurance that the line of succession will continue.
Instead, Shakespeare ends the play with his mind on old age.
An anxiety that Kurosawa understood too well.
Kurosawa was 75 when he directed this.
He was terrified of the future.
And it's easy to see Kurosawa himself in the figure of Hidetora,
as a man who built his legend on the stories of flawed heroes and grand battles
faced with his own mortality.