Akira Kurosawa's Ran

The title promises chaos.  It does not fail to deliver.

Ran cobbles together elements of King Lear and Macbeth to spectacular effect, proving the universality of Shakespeare's vision.  At the same time, Ran is wholly original, the work of an auteur whose vision had grown and changed as he entered the final phases of his career.  Unlike the aging Lord Hidetora, however, Kurosawa does not lose his finely wrought command of the situation.  We have, I suspect, inspiration from traditional Noh theatre in the sometimes elaborate formality of the the acting.  This formality is offset, though, by scenes that unfold more naturally, scenes in which human actions take place with a kind of inevitability as far beyond our ken or control as the clouds that brood dramatically but affectlessly over the battlefields and heaths of the film.  The director himself, after decades of staying true to black and white, takes on the primary color palette in its most fundamental form, catching up on technicolor with a vengeance.  Besides the red, yellow, and blue of the flags of the Ichimonji clan, we have blood that washes over the whole film in streams, rivulets, flood beds that usually run dry but not now.  Blood doesn't just flow here; it spurts, jets, sprays across the frame.  The stylized unreality of it is pointed, deliberate.  Thus there is another element, that of horror.  The pale, ghastly flesh of Lord Hidetora as he confronts the reality of his sons' mistreatment of him reflects the nightmarish quality of his experience.  The film is heavily stylized but also bears elements of realism.  We are watching something foreign but at the same time Shakespearean in its universality.  The experience is, I imagine, not so different from that of sitting in the Elizabethan theatre.

Unlike King Lear, though, we have no Edgar to emerge victorious and restore a new order even as the protagonist, the exemplar of the old order, dies.  Ran is much more nihilistic than Shakespeare's bleakest.  In keeping with its Elizabethan antecedent, Ran does at the end briefly give us a sense that family bonds can be meaningful, after all, but then snatches that sentiment away from us.  There is no justice in the universe, says King Lear, unless we impose it upon the world ourselves through our wills.  Edgar will do so in Lear.  Ran instead leaves us with a parting image of the gods' blindness and impotence.  The only order that ever was in this world was written in blood, and this is the inevitable result of it. 

I had the great fortune of viewing this film once on the big screen at AFI's Silver Theatre in Maryland. The colors were vivid, terrifying, magnificent.  There is a powerful but brutal beauty to this film, the kind that only a master at his peak can produce.