Do I Still Love 1985's Ran?

1985 Toho
Directed by: Akira Kurosawa; Written by: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide
Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada, Peter, Hisashi Igawa, and Yoshiko Miyazaki
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 162 Minutes
The Nicsperiment: 9/10

Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging, yet respected warlord, falls asleep on a hillside after a boar hunt, three grown sons looking on. He suddenly awakens, declares that he is abdicating his Lordship, and appoints his oldest son, Taro, as Lord of the lands. Hidetora will symbolically keep his title and a small complement of fighting men, but Taro will have ruling authority over the Ichimonji clan. One son, Jiro, concurs, but the other, Saburo, vehemently disagrees with the idea, urging his father to reconsider this rash decision. Hidetora exiles Saburo in anger, and from there, nothing goes right. Soon, the kingdom falls into a living hell of chaos and violence, and the weathered, worn down Hidetora not only finds himself powerless to stop it, but one of the main targets of its ire.

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I first saw Akira Kurosawa's Ran in 2005, for me an epic and highly emotional year, and the 1985 Kurosawa epic's visuals and heightened emotions swept me away. I immediately elevated Ran into my top five favorite films of all time, despite only having viewed it once. In the eighteen years since, that viewing has remained my last...until now. As a part of my "Do I Still Love..." series, I am finally revisiting the film for this very piece. I had seen the other four films I've already covered for this series multiple (if not dozens) of times before revisiting them. Those films all held their positions in my top five. Will Ran? Is there a reason I haven't felt compelled to revisit it once over the last 18 years until now?

Ah, the "blood" font

Akira Kurosawa's legacy as one of the great filmmakers was already cemented long before the release of Ran, which hit theaters decades after Kurosawa's star had begun to fade, and a new generation of Japanese filmmakers had taken center stage. Ran's rapturous reception was thus a profound announcement that the Kurosawa of 1985 was just as large a force to be reckoned with as the Kurosawa of the 1950s, bringing him his first and only "Best Director" Oscar nomination. Ran also marked Kurosawa's third Shakespeare adaptation, after 1957's Throne of Blood and 1960's the Bad Sleep Well. Ran adapts the Bard's King Lear to 16th century Japan, and here I should confess, while I like King Lear, my favorite works by Billy Shakes are Othello and Macbeth, likely because they feature such monumentally evil villains. Notably, Ran features villainous characters, but no one who can be considered a pure villain.

I don't know, though, those clouds look suspicious

The film begins with the most widescreen shots possible, boar chased by horseback hunters through grassy meadows, atop massive hills, among towering mountains. Kurosawa storyboarded every shot in this film long before he set them to celluloid, and it shows. Every frame of this film is gorgeous. Other than these opening shots, though, Ran begins a bit sleepily, with Hidetora, his sons, and their entourage lounging around on the hilltop, until Hidetora literally falls asleep. However, from the moment Hidetora wakes from his dream, the film kicks into a higher gear. It's incredible in these first scenes just how clearly Kurosawa defines Hidetora's three sons, as well as their individual relationships with their father.

NOTE: I'm not an expert on how the Japanese trait color, but from an American understanding, yellow for cowardice, red for passion, and blue for somber and thoughtful sure do fit!

While the other two brothers walk away from their sleeping father, Saburo takes pains to pull some shrub branches together, setting them up around Hidetaro to shade him from the afternoon sun. When Hidetora awakes and issues his decree, Taro agrees without much pushback, and the opportunistic Jiro follows suit. Saburo's reaction is quite different. The genius at work here is that we've seen just how much care Saburo has for his aging father, as opposed to his brothers. Since Kurosawa has taken such effort to draw that detail, Saburo's contention with his father's decree feels out of legitimate concern for both his father's well-being, as well as the well-being of the kingdom his father fought so hard to establish. This also makes it even worse that Hidetora reacts to this contention so harshly, banishing Saburo, along with Tango, a loyal royal servant who agrees with Saburo's sentiments.

 

Oh well, at least we still have these cool horses

Hidetora thinks he can now gently fade into retirement, but he almost immediately faces a rude awakening. The old man hasn't counted on the pull of Taro's wife, Lady Kaede. If the film has an outright villain, it's Kaede, though even she is justified in her actions. Her goal to destroy the Ichimonji clan is born of Hidetora's own actions against Kaede's family. Years before the events of the film, as Hidetora violently fought to unite the land under his rule, he murdered Kaede's parents and took their family castle as his own. With Hidetora now away from power, and Kaede's weak-willed, insecure husband now holding it, Kaede is easily able to influence her husband's decisions by needling his ego. She quickly goads Taro into stripping his father of the legacy title, and soon is able to force Hidetaro away from the royal palace, known in the film as The First Castle.

 

Swords, candles, shutters, and kimonos

I'd be remiss not to mention the Biblical parallels and influences here in this Eastern film. The early scene of Saburo covering the sleeping Hidetaro, as his mocking brothers look on is a clear allusion to Noah and his sons. In the book of Genesis, an elderly, naked Noah gets drunk and passes out, and one son, Ham, runs to his brothers, eager to mockingly spill the beans on their father's activities. The other two sons, Shem and Japheth, then walk backward to their father and cover him, so that they will not see his nakedness. In an inverse of Ran, the son who did NOT help the father is cursed, as Noah dooms Ham's future generations, while blessing those of Shem and Japheth. There's also a clear parallel between the scheming Kaede and Queen Jezebel from the book of Kings I, who wields a considerably negative influence on her husband, King Ahab, to torment the prophets of God. Of course, as Ran is an adaptation of King Lear, these Biblical points of reference are not surprising.

Pictured: Readers by the halfway point of my long form pieces

As Hidetaro is forced out, the land devolves into chaos. Taro and Jiro conspire to join their forces to attack Hidetaro's complement of fighting men, and in the melee, perhaps purposefully, one of Jiro's men shoots Taro. With Taro now dead, Jiro takes the throne, and Hidetaro, descending into madness, wanders off in the wilderness with his companion, the fool and essentially court jester, Kyoami. Jiro settles in to the first castle and is immediately seduced by Kaede, who encourages Jiro to have his wife murdered. Ironically, Jiro's wife, Lady Sue, along with her brother, Tsurumaru, also suffered at Hidetaro's hand, as the now mad and deposed old ruler once had the siblings entire clan wiped out, after which he had Tsuramaru blinded. Jiro then orders his general, Kurogane, to put Sue to death. Kurogane, who I believe is a Biblical parallel to King David's general, Joab, sees Kaede's influence in Jiro's commands, and refuses the deed.

 

He could sit 100 feet above her and she'd still be in control

Saburo finally returns with his fighters, who outmaneuver Jiro's army, and Saburo and Tango, with Kyoami's help, find the wandering, mad Hidetaro. Saburo and Hidetaro reconcile, only for Saburo to be taken down by a stray bullet, and Hidetaro to die shortly after from his grief. Over their broken bodies, Kyoami shouts impotently at the sky to the gods, "If you exist, hear me! You are mischievous and cruel! Are you so bored up there, you must crush us like ants? Is it such fun to see men weep?" to which a grief-stricken Tango reprimands, "Enough! Do no blaspheme! It is the gods who weep. They see us killing each other over and over since time began. They can't save us ourselves. Men prefer sorrow over joy, suffering over peace."

Thankfully, they also sometimes prefer a perfectly composed cinematic shot

As rival forces to the Ichimonji's join the fray, Jiro's forces are decimated, and in an incredibly cathartic moment, Kurogane marches to the top of the first castle and beheads the scheming Kaede, her blood spraying the wall like pus from a blister. However, that catharsis is rendered nearly mute by Kaede's final words. She admits just before the sword meets her neck that her plan from the beginning was the total destruction of the Ichimonji clan...and as the blood drips from the wall, Kurogane realizes to his horror that Kaede has succeeded.

 

Maybe my favorite shot in any movie

In the ensuing carnage and chaos of battle that follows, Jiro and even Kurogane are struck down, and Sue is presumed dead. With all Ichimonjis dead, a massive funeral procession wanders through the smoking, apocalyptic countryside. As the procession passes and vanishes into the murky ether, the blind Tsurumaru wanders near the precipice of a towering cliff, carrying a portrait of the Buddha given to him as a symbol of hope by his sister. He trips, nearly falling to his death, and drops the Buddha portrait, as the camera moves back to showcase the massive, devastated landscape, upon which Tsurumaru, the last man standing, is a meagre, insignificant silhouette against the destruction. Credits roll.

 

Congratulations, you are nothing

After this recent viewing, I can now see I initially assigned Ran meaning that isn't actually there. I took that final shot of Tsurumaru on the cliff side to symbolize humanity's place in the universe, a tiny, barely perceptible figure, a mite against a vast landscape whose size and nature he cannot fathom. I translated the rest of the film's 162 minutes against that Rosetta Stone, but with decades of hindsight, and a greater knowledge of the totality of Kurosawa's work, I now know I was watching the film in the wrong language. Kurosawa's gaze of ambition for Ran is far more earthbound.

 

More like looking on a nuclear horizonward

In the last decades of his life, Kurosawa became quiet terrified at the prospect of nuclear war. Ran is about mankind's tendency toward conflict, war, and death. It does not explore his place in the universe. It explores the way humans naturally drift toward forming tribes and fighting the tribes around them until they destroy each other...and that's about it. Granted, it's an EXCELLENT film on that topic, with brother fighting against brother, decades old grudges that seemed dormant roaring to life and annihilating all sense of order. But is there more depth here? What of that ponderous, near final shot of the Buddha portrait falling to the ground? I once thought Kurosawa intended it to symbolize the way mankind can never comprehend not only his place in the universe, but a God who created it...but I now think it just means that all hope once present in the film is lost, and that, at the deepest, mankind has failed to live up to religion's loftier ideals.

 

Kurosawa, if you give me a religious or philosophical inch, I will probably take a mile

After this rewatch, I can't pretend I enjoy Ran more than the films I watched dozens of times in my youth and teenage years, like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, or the great films from the era of my early married life, like There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men or even The Dark Knight. There are even classic Japanese films I can definitively say I like more than Ran, like Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff or Ozu's Late Spring. However, that's not to say I don't love Ran.

I did not come here to burn Ran, but to praise it

Kurosawa's visuals here are as good as in any movie ever made. His landscape shots are awe-inspiring. His use of color is stunning. In a stroke of genius, he gives each of the brothers a color motif, so that one has blue banners, one red, one yellow. When the banners are set against the sky, when they're set against each other in war, they're always beautiful, and helpful when parsing out maneuvers in the film's stunning battle set pieces. The performances are excellent all around, as well. Toru Takemitsu's score is ominous and beautiful, a callback to the evocative and emotional dramatics of 19th Century Romanticism. 

Well, maybe I'll burn it a little

However, the things I love about this film also house Ran's flaws, however minor. For one, I find that the older I get as a film viewer, the less patience I have for a shots that linger past their welcome. Kurosawa could have cut at least 20-minutes of still landscape shots and actually heightened the impact of those remaining. As painterly as the visuals appear, this is, after all, a film, and there are several moments where Ran would benefit from moving along instead of listlessly hanging on an overripe moment. I suspect some of the false depth I assigned the film in the past is due to me filling up these leisurely images with meaning that isn't there. As far as acting, as much as I love Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora, the grotesque exaggerations of his aging makeup late in the film, as well as his exaggerated expressions themselves are a bit too elevated compared to the rest of the cast's more grounded appearances and performances. Also, as much as I love the score, I don't like how it essentially only appears at the end of scenes, and infrequently at that--some scenes that drag a bit could be greatly enhanced by Nakadai's music. And finally, to close, I must yet again come back to the themes.

If only you'd both known you were enemies

"War is bad" is not exactly deep, but there is more depth here than that. The reason the peace from the end of Hidetora's reign cannot carry over when he is gone is because that peace was achieved through senseless violence, and the brutal treatment of the Ichimonji's foes...though I guess if Hidetora had completely annihilated those foes, and killed Kaede when she was a child, she wouldn't have been around later to destroy his kingdom from the inside. Fitfully, Ran can translate into several different English words, but I find "Chaos" to be the most apt. As it stands then, Ran is visually pretty, and also pretty hopeless, with only its aesthetic beauty lifting it above the encroachment of a thrashing sea of nihilism. Several years after Ran's release, Kurosawa would explore themes of nuclear war again, with 1990's Dreams. Dreams features a series of escalating vignettes, where human beings wipe each other out with nuclear weapons, and all that remain are grotesque mutants who spend their days wailing away in pain. While Dreams is not nearly as good a film as Ran, it does, after offering an even lower nadir for humanity, feature a far more hopeful ending. Its final vignette, taking place in an unstated period in time, showcases a man's visit to a rural village, where the  citizens have forsaken technology for a simpler, more ancient way of life. When someone in this village dies, generally by old age, their death is counted as a celebration that their life was long and peaceful. I wish that while making Ran, Kurosawa, could have found that sort of hope...and also a more active editor. Ran does make its sad moral argument, that violence begets violence begets violence, with near perfect visual poetry. But it's lost its spot as my fifth favorite film. 

And now this series changes gears. 

If Ran isn't my fifth favorite film of all time, then what is?