Man is born crying! He cries and cries, and then he dies!
Kyoami
Table of Contents
Preamble and Research
Reviewing this movie was difficult for me. Usually, after I finish a piece of media I have an idea of the angle I want to take with my review. With this one, I had the thought – This is good. But I don’t know why and how to frame that in my review.
That let me to do some reading on Sunday morning. I read some Wikipedia pages, a review of the movie by Roger Ebert, and some of the text of the play King Lear which this movie is an adaptation of.
Here are the links of what I read
War, Violence, and Colour
Reading those things provided some further context for this movie for me. I learned that Ran was at the time of its release, the most expensive Japanese movie ever made. This at least is quite obvious. The movie looks expansive. Intricate costumes, large number of extras and horses. The battle scenes looked like actual battles.
Another thing about this movie is its quite colourful, I especially love the most of whom wear colourful costumes. Even the griminess of the war scenes is colourful with scenes of fire, blood and the uniforms and standards of the warriors standing out against the smoke coming out from their weapons.
The guns fired by the soldiers in this movie are arquebus which according to Wikipedia was technology that made its way to Japan by the 1540s. You hear a lot of this weapon’s sounds in this movie. There are entire scenes filled with the sound of this weapon and it lends a harrowing quality to them.
King Lear vs. Ran
I don’t think I can do justice with a compare and contrast between Ran and the source material it is adapting, Shakespeare’s King Lear. I have not read King Lear in full and I have not seen a performance of it. In fact, the only Shakespeare play I have seen performed is Macbeth when I was high school and we went on a trip to the University of Toronto and watched their theatre class perform the play. It was a good time.
Other than the most obvious difference between the settings of Japan in Ran and England in King Lear, I think the most interesting to me personally is that Ran chooses to make the three children of the king sons instead of daughters. I wonder why that particular choice was made.
King Lear like many of Shakespeare’s other plays is a tragedy and I think that this movie captures the tragic nature of the narrative in the source material in its own unique way. A very good adaptation it is indeed.
Noh
One of the interesting elements in this movie is it borrowing from Noh, a form of Japanese theatre, perhaps a nod to the source material being a theatre play.
While most of the characters in Ran are portrayed by conventional acting techniques, two performances are reminiscent of Japanese Noh theatre. Noh is a form of Japanese traditional theatre requiring highly-trained actors and musicians where emotions are primarily conveyed by stylized conventional gestures.
The heavy, ghost-like make-up worn by Tatsuya Nakadai‘s character, Hidetora, resembles the emotive masks worn by traditional Noh performers. The body language exhibited by the same character is also typical of Noh theatre: long periods of static motion and silence, followed by an abrupt, sometimes violent, change in stance. The character of Lady Kaede is also Noh-influenced. The Noh treatment emphasizes the ruthless, passionate, and single-minded natures of these two characters.
The Wikipedia page on Ran
Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa, the man who directed this movie is himself quite the interesting person. By the time Ran came out, Kurosawa had already had a fairly lengthy and prolific career in film. Kurosawa is 75 when this film is made, I found what Roger Ebert said in his review about that fact quite compelling:
I recount this history because I think there is much of Kurosawa in “Ran,” made when he was 75. He was preoccupied with mortality in his later years. His eyesight was failing, he attempted suicide, and although he announced “Ran” would be his last film, he returned to end-thoughts in “Dreams” (1990), based on an old man’s reveries, and “Madadayo” (1993), about an ancient professor who is honored by his students on his birthday; the title translates as “Not yet!” and refers to the old man’s defiant annual affirmation that he is still not dead.
Roger Ebert in his review of Ran (1985)
One interesting thing I learned from reading Kurosawa’s Wikipedia page is that his movie The Hidden Fortress was one of the inspirations for George Lucas’ 1977 movie Star Wars. In fact, Lucas was a fan of Kurosawa and helped him secure funding for what could be considered the spiritual predecessor to Ran, another of Kurosawa’s samurai movies, Kagemusha.
In 1977, American director George Lucas released Star Wars, a wildly successful science fiction film influenced by Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, among other works. Lucas, like many other New Hollywood directors, revered Kurosawa and considered him a role model, and was shocked to discover that the Japanese film-maker was unable to secure financing for any new work.
The two met in San Francisco in July 1978 to discuss the project Kurosawa considered most financially viable: Kagemusha, the epic story of a thief hired as the double of a medieval Japanese lord of a great clan. Lucas, enthralled by the screenplay and Kurosawa’s illustrations, leveraged his influence over 20th Century Fox to coerce the studio that had fired Kurosawa just ten years earlier to produce Kagemusha, then recruited fellow fan Francis Ford Coppola as co-producer.[136]
Quote from the Wikipedia page for Akira Kurosawa
The success of Kagemusha then allowed Kurosawa to make the movie I am reviewing. I certainly wasn’t expecting a connection between George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa so that was a Cool Thing to learn.
Conclusions
Is Ran a good movie? Yes, I think so. The cinematography, costume design and acting all make for a very compelling (and tragic) package. Most importantly of all, it led to me learning about Kurosawa and his career in film which is a wonderful thing to happen.
Am I going to watch more Kurosawa movies? Maybe. Eventually. I do want to explore all kinds of other movies. Maybe next year I can do a deep dive into his work. Until then I’ll have Ran.