Now available on DVD from the Criterion Collection is Akira
Kurosawa's late masterpiece
Ran (1985), the title
meaning "turmoil" or "chaos" or "rebellion," according to
Japanese film and culture expert Donald Richie. After
completing
Kagemusha (1980, also available from the
Criterion Collection), Kurosawa returned to the script for
Ran, a project that he had been working on for over a
decade. And unfortunately, Kurosawa had to tackle the same
problem that plagued him in pre-production for the better part
of 15 years: money. Once again, it was difficult to find, so
just as he did on
Dersu Uzala (1975, currently available
on dvd from Kino) and
Kagemusha, Kurosawa had to depend
on foreign financing. For
Ran, he turned to Serge
Silberman, a veteran producer since the 1950s, best known for
financing the latter films of Luis Bunuel. Fortunately,
Kurosawa's working methods proved to be compatible with
Silberman's own expectations. "They call me the Emperor,"
Kurosawa reportedly told him, "but with you I will not be the
Emperor."
Ran cost nearly $12 million to make and a year
to shoot.
Ran is a reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's
King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly
16th-century warlord named Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai),
who announces that he will divide his kingdom equally among his
three sons and "thus enjoy my remaining years." In his dotage,
he falls prey to the false flattery of his treacherous sons Taro
(Akira Terao) and Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), while banishing his
youngest son Saburo (Daisuke Ryu), the only member of the family
who loves him enough to tell him the hard, inconvenient truth
that his decision is not wise. Thanks to his foolish pride and
his own history of violence, as well as the smooth machinations
of his daughter-in-law Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), the house of
Ichimonji collapses under its own weight as the sons battle each
other over total control.
Hidetora's intentions are pure. Similar to the sickly
bureaucrat in
Ikiru (1952, also available from the
Criterion Collection), the warrior wants his life to mean
something, other than the wanton bloodshed that has marked his
lordship. So he decides to make a lasting peace by dividing his
kingdom among his sons. But in a departure from the source
material, Kurosawa notes, "I've tried to give Lear a history. I
try to make it clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of
blood-thirsty savagery." Hidetora's atonement for a lifetime of
war is to stumble like a ghostly fool down a road to hell
littered with the crumpled wrecks of good intentions, the blood
of innocents, and the burning vestiges of his stately
kingdom.
Kurosawa treats the Shakespearean text in much the same way as
he treated "Macbeth" for
Throne of Blood (1957, also
available from the Criterion Collection). He is respectful of
the source, but Kurosawa makes it his own, primarily by bringing
the rich Japanese dramatic heritage of the Noh to the story.
According to Shakespearean scholar Jan Knott, "Kurosawa's
greatness lies in his capacity to reveal historical similarity
and variance; to find a Shakespearean sense of doom in other,
remote, and apparently alien historical places...the further the
‘other' setting is, the less likely it is that the image will
match the text. It stops being an illustration and becomes its
essence and its sign...And here lies Kurosawa's genius and the
singularity of his Shakespeare. The theater he makes use of is,
of course, classic Japanese theater"—Noh.
Noh is essentially a composite art based on the elements of
song, dance and drama. It is the oldest living dramatic form in
the world today that makes use of masks. And in
Ran, as
he did in
Throne of Blood, Kurosawa brings a Noh-like
influence to the music score, production design, acting style,
and makeup. While composer Toru Takemitsu brings a great deal
of Western style into the
Ran score (particularly from
Gustav Mahler), it is the Noh fue, that piercing, singular
flute, that will conclude the film and punctuate its poignant
tragedy. In an interview conducted in 1985 (included in
Criterion's excellent liner notes), Takemitsu discusses his
communication with sensei (Kurosawa) over the musical direction
of
Ran, as well as the difficulty in mixing Kurosawa's
evocation of Mahler (the director played Mahler's "The Song of
the Earth" over the rushes during editing) with the original
compositions Takemitsu made for the Noh fue. Kurosawa told
Takemitsu that the story must be seen as a drama unfolding
beneath the heavens. "The music, too, must come from the sky!"
Kurosawa directed.
Kurosawa is firmly within the Noh tradition when he uses vibrant
colors to delineate between the three warring brothers. Each
one has his own color, so when the three factions go to war, we
can clearly tell who is who in the midst of chaos. The color
scheme also acts as a subtextual agent in creating a looming
sense of conflict, even upon first meeting the characters. The
three sons sit next to their father, each one distinguished not
by the same color under their father's unifying banner, but
under opposing colors of Sabo's blue, Jiro's red, and Taro's
yellow. This use of color allows Kurosawa to abandon, if only
for a moment, his usual mise en scene, that of a three-point
structure, of one or two characters occupying the background,
with the other character(s) staying in the foreground, all in
focus. This familiar structure is seen later on in
Ran
when Hidetora is forced to assume a subservient position to the
new lord Sabo and his scheming wife Lady Hadeo.
Author Stephen Prince, one of the few experts on Kurosawa cinema
in the world, talks about the Noh acting in the DVD's audio
commentary. Only two characters in the film use Noh acting
style, Hidetora and Lady Kaede. In Hidetora's case, actor
Tatsuya Nakadei was instructed to more or less maintain one
basic expression for each scene, helped in part by the make-up
that made his face look like a mask. For example, when the
third castle burns around him, Hidetora retains a blank
expression. There's no screaming histrionics, such as Toshiro
Mifune used to brilliant effect at the brutal end of
Throne
of Blood, just a seemingly implacable mask that could be
read several different ways, either as unfathomable misery or
wearisome acceptance of his damnation. It is creepy and
Kubrickian in its intense personification of otherworldly
madness. On the other hand, Lady Kaede, played brilliantly by
Mieko Harada, certainly wears a Noh-like mask of implacable
evil, but in one brilliant scene, where she lunges towards Jiro
with a dagger, she displays a cat-like ferocity that is miles
away from Noh acting. Bent on merciless revenge, Kaede is a
savage juggernaut, made in the image of Hidetora's own cruelty,
for it was he who killed her family and overtook her home many
years before. Her Noh mask is deceit doubling as death.
Aside from the Noh influence and Shakespearean source text,
Ran is also an action film with stunning battle scenes.
Truly, one shouldn't expect less from the creator of
Seven
Samurai (1954) and
Yojimbo (1961—both available from
the Criterion Collection), but at this late in his career, it
would have been understandable if Kurosawa's edge had dulled,
just a bit. But it did not. Kurosawa creates a dramatic
kinesis of soldiers and horses, flying arrows and distant guns,
billowing banners and choking smoke, and a flood of bloodshed
and ignoble death. The violence is potent. During the first
major battle scene, Kurosawa shows a glimpse of a wounded
soldier, weeping impotently on the ground, holding his own
severed arm. [A great admirer of Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg no
doubt echoed this shot in
Saving Private Ryan (1998) when
a soldier hesitantly picks up his own severed arm on the shores
of Normandy.] And the principle architect of the tragedy, Lady
Kaede, meets a spectacular end, reminiscent of the final duel in
Kurosawa's
Sanjuro (1962), where Toshiro Mifune unleashes
an arterial spray from his opponent (played by a young Tatsuya
Nakadai) that is equally unforgettable and gruesome.
Kurosawa liked to call
Ran his "three-castle film,"
referring to the film's three major sets. Real historical
castles were used for some exteriors, but the third castle was
built from scratch, on the moonscape side of Mr. Fuji, no less,
at the tune of $1.6 million. And it was built only to burn down
for three whirling cameras. Perhaps not since Buster Keaton
sunk a real locomotive in
The General (1926) did a
filmmaker spend so much money for one single scene. There was
no matte photography. No CGI. Just brave, ruthless filmmaking
by a 70-year old man. And it is a stunning moment when star
Matsuya Nakadai (who speaks of the moment in the DVD's new video
interview) walks flawlessly down the steep steps of the engulfed
castle. Kurosawa said, "Nakadai did it perfectly, without a
single misstep, staring sightlessly like a sleepwalker or a
madman."
The DVD boasts several supplements, including a 30-minute
documentary on the making of
Ran that is part of the Toho
Masterworks series
Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to
Create. There is also a 35-minute video piece
reconstructing
Ran through Kurosawa's plentiful paintings
and sketches. But the best supplement is the feature-length
documentary
AK, a film directed by Chris Marker and
produced by Serge Silberman. This film, about the making of
Ran was actually submitted to the Cannes Film Festival in
place of
Ran because Kurosawa was unable to complete the
film on time. Shot in late 1984,
AK shows the director
alternately smiling obligingly and looking quite stern whenever
his strict orders are not followed precisely. If
Ran is
distinguished for its long shot distance, of the heavens looking
down upon the follies of Man, then
AK relishes in the
intimacy of the close-up medium shot. We are eavesdropping on
the minute details of a master at work. When stubborn fog on
Mt. Fuji interrupts the shooting schedule, Kurosawa improvises
by shooting the fog to act as smoke from battle. As the
narrator says, Kurosawa "is hacking his film out of the
weather's boot matter, like a sculptor." Marker captures
moments of irony that are apart from Kurosawa's production, such
as when we see actors in full samurai regalia walking between
rows of parked cars, the early morning fog crawling around on
the ground beneath them.
AK also introduces Kurosawa's "phalanx of the faithful,"
seven associates who were Kurosawa's acknowledged inner circle.
The first three acted as Kurosawa's cameramen on
Ran:
Ishiro Honda, Kurosawa's longtime friend, colleague, and
assistant director (not to mention the creator of "Godzilla");
Asakazu Nakai, who worked with sensei on
Seven Samurai,
Throne of Blood, and
Kagemusha; and Takao Saito,
the officially credited cameraman. These three were the
"masters of the three-camera diagram," the set-up that Kurosawa
had long used to shoot his films. The remaining "seven samurai"
were Yoshiro Muraki, the production designer, Fumio Yanoguchi,
Kurosawa's soundman since the mid-1950s, Takeji Sano, the chief
electrician, and Teruyo Nogami, the production manager, who had
the distinction for being with sensei the longest: she started
as his script girl on
Rashomon (1950, also available from
the Criterion Collection).
Ran did well in Europe, especially in France, where the
success of
AK at Cannes whetted the anticipation for
Kurosawa's epic. Shortly after the European premiere,
Ran opened in America on September 27, 1985 for the
twenty-third New York Film Festival. (Kurosawa arrived at the
festival just as Hurricane Gloria was pounding Manhattan.) The
film garnered nearly universal raves. David Edelstein of
The
Village Voice wrote, "Not even David Lean has Kurosawa's eye
for color, for turning landscapes into formidable characters."
Richard A. Blake in
America wrote, "
Ran insures
him a place in the pantheon as a peer of Sergei Eisenstein, Abel
Gance and D.W. Griffith." Drawing upon Eisenstein, Gance and
Griffith too was Vincent Canby in
The New York Times, who
wrote, "
Ran has the terrible logic and clarity of a
morality tale seen in tight close-up, of a myth that, while
being utterly specific and particular in its time and place,
remains ageless, infinitely adaptable." There were a few
dissenters. In
Vanity Fair, critic Stephen Schiff seems
to have seen a different picture when he dismissed the picture
as "long and boring and beautiful" and labeling Kurosawa "the
Gene Autry of Japanese cinema, loping westward with a six-gun in
his belt and a song in his throat."
When Oscar® season started, director Sidney Lumet (who also
provides an appreciation for the DVD) successfully campaigned to
get Kurosawa a Best Director nomination. Lumet said,
"'Masterpiece' is an overused term, but I don't think it's
overused here...There are some directors whose films can be
justified solely on their sense of beauty, and there are some
whose films can be justified solely on their depth of
profundity. Kurosawa is the only director who puts the two
together." Indeed, Kurosawa became the first Japanese director
to be so honored with a nomination since Hiroshi Teshigahara for
Woman in the Dunes (1964). Alas, Kurosawa, arguably the
greatest active filmmaker in the world at the time, lost the
Oscar® to Sydney Pollack for
Out of Africa (1985).
Donald Richie notes in his indispensable book
The Films of
Akira Kurosawa, "
Ran is not only an allegory of
Kurosawa's own life but a parable of all of our lives. From a
sometimes sentimental humanism...Kurosawa has moved closer to a
more precise and honest statement concerning humanity and its
predicament. That is what Shakespeare did as well and, in
King Lear, left us a tragedy with little hope but much
understanding. In
Ran, Kurosawa—in Shakespeare-like
fashion—has shown us the tragedy of the human dilemma. He has
done it with great honesty and so thrills our senses that we can
never forget his lesson. To make this statement was perhaps the
director's most important reason for creating this extraordinary
film."
Indeed, it's tempting to consider
Ran as autobiography.
Both Hidetora and sensei were in their seventies, looking back
on their life's work. And like Hidetora, Kurosawa was dealing
with one crisis after another, both emotional and professional.
When he wasn't struggling to find an open checkbook to finance
his films, he was reeling from the loss of two of his most
trusted assistants: Fumio Yano, his sound engineer, and Tatsu
Kuze, the expert of the staged sword fight. But more
tragically, Kurosawa's wife, Kyo, died of cancer during the
making of
Ran. Production was suspended for one day for
her funeral. For Kurosawa,
Ran was the culmination of
his life's work. Usually, when asked what his best film was,
Kurosawa would reply, "the next." But during the shooting in
late 1984, when asked the same question, Kurosawa simply said,
"
Ran."
For more information about
Ran, visit
The
Criterion Collection. To order
Ran, go to
TCM
Shopping.
by Scott McGee
