Akira Kurosawa’s matrix days epic, Ran (”Chaos,” 1985) is the almost perfect realization of more than ten years of planning, one that survived the cessation of numerous colleagues, the passing of the director’s wife, troubled financing, and other problems. After the relative omission of Dodes’ka-den in 1970 and a suicide attempt soon thereafter, Kurosawa came back Phoenix-similarly to with the Soviet-produced Dersu Uzala in 1975, and at the age of 70 released Kagemusha (1980), a veil partly financed by 20th Century-Fox and sponsored by disciples Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
Kurosawa famously said later that he regarded Kagemusha, despite all its acclaim, as a mere warm-up to Ran and, truth be told, Kagemusha fails in fundamental ways that Ran does not. Grievously miscast after the sudden firing of Shintaro Katsu, for whom the picture was written, it suffered from notably bad acting on the part of last-minute replacement Tatsuya Nakadai (made all the more painful when one considers how great Toshiro Mifune might have been), an awful score, and overbearing desire to hammer home its Theme at the expense of all else.
After Kagemusha, Ran then is a revelation. Freely adapting King Lear to Japan’s bloody civil wars, the screenplay follows septuagenarian warlord Hidetora’s (Tatsuya Nakadai) ruin after a lifetime of violent rule comes back to haunt him in his old age. Experiencing nightmares and creeping senility, he abruptly abdicates his kingdom, dividing it among his sons (Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, and Daisuke Ryu), but years of bloody leadership have had their effect, and very quickly alliances break apart, familial ties crumble, and greed and vengeance come out into the open.
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All this unfolds as if viewed from the heavens, whose cloud formations seem to reflect sadly on man’s unending determination to destroy himself.
Japanese cinema scholar Donald Richie rightly called Ran “a tragedy with little hope but much understanding.” It’s infused with the same humanism found in all of Kurosawa’s best work, but told from the point of view of a much more pessimistic 75-year-old man. The emphasis on Hidetora’s past and its consequences is one the film’s greatest achievements, one that goes beyond Shakespeare’s play, and a concern Kurosawa rightly felt vital to understanding his main character. Hidetora’s backstory drives nearly everything that happens in the film, from the brother and sister who respond to Hidetora’s slaughter of their family with him retreating into Buddhism and she learning to release her hatred, to Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada in a superb, widely-acclaimed performance), whose very different reaction races to a kind of infernal bliss at the destruction of the Hidetora clan, ending with a spectacularly bloody bang.
As wrong as Nakadai was for Kagemusha, his performance in Ran is absolutely right. Indeed, the ensemble work across the board is splendid. For various reasons Kurosawa at this time enjoyed making surprising casting choices, and here all of them work, from transgender entertainer Peter as Hidetora’s jester, to Crazy Cats comedian Hitoshi Ueki as an allied warlord.
From a production standpoint, Ran is flawless, a technical achievement of monumental proportions, from Kurosawa’s electrifying battle scenes — filmed as seas of bright red, yellow, and blue flags with horrifying splendor blur as horses charge into waves of ultra-violence — to Emi Wada’s Oscar-winning Costume Design and Tameyuki Aimi’s Noh-based makeup. Unlike Shinichiro Ikebe’s utterly inadequate score for Kagemusha, Toru Takemitsu’s Mahler-esque cues for Ran complement the film marvelously.
All of this comes together in an extraordinary seven-minute battle sequence early in the film, one of ghastly, beautiful chaos without sound effects or dialogue of any kind. Instead, we hear only Takemitsu’s music amid flying arrows, pouring blood, dismembered limbs, flapping banners and, finally, leaping flames and billowing smoke.