Top 25 Favourite Films: #2 Ran (Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
#2. Ran. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1985
Ran is Akira Kurosawa's last great masterpiece, his final truly large-scale film, and his last dalliance with the Jidaigeki (films about the samurai period) genre with which he is indelibly linked. It is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and nihilistic films of cinema, an adaption of Shakespeare's King Lear transposed to Japan's Period of Warring states, in which an elderly warlord, Hidetora (a career defining performance from Tatsuya Nakadai) sees his entire legacy destroyed by his warring sons, falls to madness, and is eventually lost in the chaos, the Ran of a period of civil war between them in which chaos and nihilism goes hand in hand with the bleakness of a director facing his own mortality
That Ran actually exists at all is, itself, worthy of a film, and indeed the documentary A.K. that accompanies most modern releases of the film goes some way to show the bloody-mindedness and ambition of Kurosawa, and, almost a sense of desperation. By the time of Ran, Kurosawa was seen by some as washed up, had attempted suicide, and had not made a film in five years, since the equally nihilistic Kagemusha, a practical dry-run for Ran. This is a film made, so it feels, in every moment by a man who knows his time is short, with his friends, and during the production of Ran, his wife, dying around him, and grasping desperately to this last great masterpiece.
At the time, after all, this was the most expensive film in Japanese history,aided by the French film producer,Serge Silberman, and the pure scale of the battles, chaos and destruct on is evident in practically every major scene, from the razing of entire samurai castles, to huge-scale pitched battles. In places, it's practically insane, as though, like his protagonist, Kurosawa's ambition has finally driven him over the edge, with the destruction of the First Castle a single take masterclass from Nakadai, as the castle burns for real around him. It is a mad film, with a mad hero, for a mad age.
Yet, save for Herzog's equally spectacular Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which an entirely real and two hundred tonne paddle steamer is hauled up an Amazonian hillside, this film feels like the final gasp of that great era of cinema in which what is in front of camera is truly, jawdroppingly real, rather than impressive model work or camera trick. Nowhere is this seen than in the pitched battles, as huge groups of horsemen and extras clash, for real, on screen, with the score often playing over silent, elegiac imagery. With the forces of the three brothers colour coded red, blue and yellow, we often have these scenes of great blocks of colour across an otherwise muted pallet, Kurosawa's camera impassive, painterly, as forces clash across battlefields and in brutal visceral sieges.
These physical battles are neatly juxtaposed by the struggle between the brothers, despite their father's pleading to stay together as "three arrows", and it is here that the film leans most heavily upon Lear, with this struggle between them eventually leading to their downfall. Yet it is arguably a film in which Lear's themes of revenge, madness and justice are best seen in the figure that most juxtaposes Hidetora, Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). Here., Kurosawa steps away from his inspiratation, and into the sense that Hidetora has been, after all, a cruel warrior, with Kaede being the daughter of a warlord he had disposed and murdered, with even their makeup evoking different elements of Japanese Noh theatre, Hidetora reduced to a ghost, Kaede to a mask behind which a powerful woman plots the downfall of her father's usurper and his sons.
In short, Ran is a clash of human culture, between an old generation, represented by Hidetora (and, undoubtedly, Kurosawa) wrapped up in the formality, decency and respect of the samurai era, in a medieval and feudal version of the world, and the shockingly modern, competitive, glory-fixated world, represented by the squabbling sons and in particular, the scheming Kaede and Taro (Akira Terao). Nowhere is this clash of modernity and traditional seen better than in the brutality of this new age in weaponised form, in the positively atomic, terrifyingly efficient form of the arquebus, which lays armies, and our heroes low-this is a film that shows, on the modern battlefield, there are no heroes, only ever more efficient ways to kill them. Unlike in Seven Samurai, where the camera swirls, balletic, through battle scenes, following our heroes, here it is passive, watching the chaos unfurl, rather than following any named character through the carnage, war in abstraction.
This film of modern fears, of modern worries dropped into a Warring States setting, is best seen in the figure of Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura). Blinded by Hidetora's men, he is perhaps the only character in the film that Kurosawa treats with sympathy, even at the point where his sister is brutally killed, and he is left alone and guideless atop the wreck of the Third Castle, clinging to the image of Buddha his sister has given them. By now, every single named character is dead, swept away by a rival samurai lord, lost to grief, or killed by the machinations of Kaede's treachery.
And then Tsurumaru, picking his way across the ruins, trips, and drops the icon, gets to his feet. The scroll is lost. Tsurumaru rises, and Kurosawa cuts to a longshot, an astonishing, stark moment of a tiny figure among the wreckage of war, having lost innocence, a victim of a world that is now unrecognisable, and stripped of even faith. Blinded, orphaned, and now lost, Tsurumaru is not just a Japanese boy atop a castle he could once have ruled, nor a symbol of a Japan still reeling from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that colour so much of post-war Japanese cinema. He is all of us, in the middle of the penultimate decade of the second millennium, stripped of decency, reason, and any form of faith.
It is pure nihilism, perhaps Kurosawa's last great statement on the samurai era, even as it reflects his last great statement on Japanese society. War is, has, and always will be meaningless, but with Ran, Kurosawa engages in a stripping away of the hope that tinged his previous Jidaigeki work, to leave us with a post-heroic era where heroes die like everyone else, innocents are put to the sword, and we are left, blind, alone, in the anarchy and despair of this world that marches on. We are left in chaos. And no film has captured that utterly bleak world view of a world without meaning, defined by ever more efficient death and ever more impotent struggle, better than Ran.
Ran is Akira Kurosawa's last great masterpiece, his final truly large-scale film, and his last dalliance with the Jidaigeki (films about the samurai period) genre with which he is indelibly linked. It is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and nihilistic films of cinema, an adaption of Shakespeare's King Lear transposed to Japan's Period of Warring states, in which an elderly warlord, Hidetora (a career defining performance from Tatsuya Nakadai) sees his entire legacy destroyed by his warring sons, falls to madness, and is eventually lost in the chaos, the Ran of a period of civil war between them in which chaos and nihilism goes hand in hand with the bleakness of a director facing his own mortality
That Ran actually exists at all is, itself, worthy of a film, and indeed the documentary A.K. that accompanies most modern releases of the film goes some way to show the bloody-mindedness and ambition of Kurosawa, and, almost a sense of desperation. By the time of Ran, Kurosawa was seen by some as washed up, had attempted suicide, and had not made a film in five years, since the equally nihilistic Kagemusha, a practical dry-run for Ran. This is a film made, so it feels, in every moment by a man who knows his time is short, with his friends, and during the production of Ran, his wife, dying around him, and grasping desperately to this last great masterpiece.
At the time, after all, this was the most expensive film in Japanese history,aided by the French film producer,Serge Silberman, and the pure scale of the battles, chaos and destruct on is evident in practically every major scene, from the razing of entire samurai castles, to huge-scale pitched battles. In places, it's practically insane, as though, like his protagonist, Kurosawa's ambition has finally driven him over the edge, with the destruction of the First Castle a single take masterclass from Nakadai, as the castle burns for real around him. It is a mad film, with a mad hero, for a mad age.
Yet, save for Herzog's equally spectacular Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which an entirely real and two hundred tonne paddle steamer is hauled up an Amazonian hillside, this film feels like the final gasp of that great era of cinema in which what is in front of camera is truly, jawdroppingly real, rather than impressive model work or camera trick. Nowhere is this seen than in the pitched battles, as huge groups of horsemen and extras clash, for real, on screen, with the score often playing over silent, elegiac imagery. With the forces of the three brothers colour coded red, blue and yellow, we often have these scenes of great blocks of colour across an otherwise muted pallet, Kurosawa's camera impassive, painterly, as forces clash across battlefields and in brutal visceral sieges.
These physical battles are neatly juxtaposed by the struggle between the brothers, despite their father's pleading to stay together as "three arrows", and it is here that the film leans most heavily upon Lear, with this struggle between them eventually leading to their downfall. Yet it is arguably a film in which Lear's themes of revenge, madness and justice are best seen in the figure that most juxtaposes Hidetora, Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). Here., Kurosawa steps away from his inspiratation, and into the sense that Hidetora has been, after all, a cruel warrior, with Kaede being the daughter of a warlord he had disposed and murdered, with even their makeup evoking different elements of Japanese Noh theatre, Hidetora reduced to a ghost, Kaede to a mask behind which a powerful woman plots the downfall of her father's usurper and his sons.
In short, Ran is a clash of human culture, between an old generation, represented by Hidetora (and, undoubtedly, Kurosawa) wrapped up in the formality, decency and respect of the samurai era, in a medieval and feudal version of the world, and the shockingly modern, competitive, glory-fixated world, represented by the squabbling sons and in particular, the scheming Kaede and Taro (Akira Terao). Nowhere is this clash of modernity and traditional seen better than in the brutality of this new age in weaponised form, in the positively atomic, terrifyingly efficient form of the arquebus, which lays armies, and our heroes low-this is a film that shows, on the modern battlefield, there are no heroes, only ever more efficient ways to kill them. Unlike in Seven Samurai, where the camera swirls, balletic, through battle scenes, following our heroes, here it is passive, watching the chaos unfurl, rather than following any named character through the carnage, war in abstraction.
This film of modern fears, of modern worries dropped into a Warring States setting, is best seen in the figure of Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura). Blinded by Hidetora's men, he is perhaps the only character in the film that Kurosawa treats with sympathy, even at the point where his sister is brutally killed, and he is left alone and guideless atop the wreck of the Third Castle, clinging to the image of Buddha his sister has given them. By now, every single named character is dead, swept away by a rival samurai lord, lost to grief, or killed by the machinations of Kaede's treachery.
And then Tsurumaru, picking his way across the ruins, trips, and drops the icon, gets to his feet. The scroll is lost. Tsurumaru rises, and Kurosawa cuts to a longshot, an astonishing, stark moment of a tiny figure among the wreckage of war, having lost innocence, a victim of a world that is now unrecognisable, and stripped of even faith. Blinded, orphaned, and now lost, Tsurumaru is not just a Japanese boy atop a castle he could once have ruled, nor a symbol of a Japan still reeling from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that colour so much of post-war Japanese cinema. He is all of us, in the middle of the penultimate decade of the second millennium, stripped of decency, reason, and any form of faith.
It is pure nihilism, perhaps Kurosawa's last great statement on the samurai era, even as it reflects his last great statement on Japanese society. War is, has, and always will be meaningless, but with Ran, Kurosawa engages in a stripping away of the hope that tinged his previous Jidaigeki work, to leave us with a post-heroic era where heroes die like everyone else, innocents are put to the sword, and we are left, blind, alone, in the anarchy and despair of this world that marches on. We are left in chaos. And no film has captured that utterly bleak world view of a world without meaning, defined by ever more efficient death and ever more impotent struggle, better than Ran.
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