I’m a Shakespeare guy, and my favorite play is King Lear. That seems odd for people who know me, the guy who cracks bad jokes at any opportunity. But why not? My favorite films are, in many cases, film noir and 70s-era antihero stories. Lear is easily the most nihilistic of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Multiple characters express views on how the world works, and the plot proves most if not all of them wrong in the end. And when I discovered Akira Kurosawa had done some Shakespeare adaptations in his work, well hey, I was gonna check those out. Granted, I have yet to see Kurosawa’s take on Hamlet, but I did watch his Macbeth in the form of Throne of Blood and his Lear in the form of today’s Stacker Countdown entry, Ran.
I should point out I was not looking forward to this one quite so much. It’s nearly three hours long, and given how miserable the characters in the Lear story, well, Ran might be more of an endurance test than most films at that length.
Actually, this one was somewhat more of an endurance test than I thought. I had to find my old DVD copy of Ran, and that wasn’t all that difficult since I knew exactly where it was, but what I didn’t realize was, unlike my other Kurosawa DVDs, Ran is not a Criterion DVD. At least my copy isn’t. That must be why I couldn’t find it, alongside so many other Kurosawa films, on Max or the Criterion Channel. And even though the disc opened with an explanation that the film had been remastered to make it look better, I couldn’t help but think that, on my 4K set, it didn’t look that good. I can chalk that up to the fact that it’s a 40 or so year old film from Japan, and I suspect the biggest issue was the subtitles just looking like something of an old video game or something. There was also a somewhat grainy look to it, but that might have always been there. But I did get used to that look. Honestly, the biggest problem was a momentary power outage in the middle of my viewing, and that meant I had to figure out what “chapter” I was on once I got my DVD player back up and running a couple minutes later.
But as for the rest, and I will try my best not to make too many comparisons to Shakespeare’s take on a much older story but I make no promises, this is very much its own story. Kurosawa was initially inspired by an old story about a warlord in feudal Japan who had three loyal sons, and he was interested in telling that story while inverting the loyalty, making the loyal sons treacherous. The Lear story was only gradually grafted on until the final script came along in the form of Ran, the Japanese word for “chaos”. After working on the script through the 70s and 80s, Kurosawa finally got the funding to make the film, a co-production between Japan and France. But during the scripting process, Kurosawa changed the focus from Shakespeare’s focus to his own. Shakespeare’s Lear, as with many of his plays especially the tragedies, was looking at the negative effects of a king’s removal from power, the biggest difference being Lear removes himself from power willingly while others are murdered or dethroned by others.
No, Kurosawa’s version is focused on what a lifetime of violence and treachery results in. As the Lear stand in, Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) says in his opening speech, he’s been waging war for fifty years to conquer the territory, and as far as he is concerned, the work may not be done yet. But he’s an old man who wants to pass the power down to one of his sons so he can enjoy the last few years of his life, essentially giving up the responsibilities of his position but retaining all the perks. He has three castles, one for each of his sons, and while he picks oldest son Taro (Akira Terao) to be the overall leader of the family, he does expect his second son Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and youngest son Saburo (Daisuke Ryu) to support Taro and for the three to be a united front against all enemies. That’s when Saburo gets up to point out that that was not the way they were raised, and it would be foolish to believe the three would somehow all be one big happy family or something. That earns him a banishment, but one visiting lord from another territory is impressed enough to still grant Saburo permission to marry his daughter despite his beggar status. Likewise, loyal retainer Tango (Masayuki Yui) sticks up for Saburo and is likewise banished, directions he opts to ignore.
That’s all from Lear, but Ran then goes in a direction that many modern takes on the Lear story suggests or hints at, namely that Hidetora is reaping what he sowed. Oldest son Taro is fairly weak-willed, and he might actually go along with his father’s plans were it not for one factor: his wife Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). Kaede married Taro in an effort by her father to avoid Hidetora’s wrath during his wars of conquest, a plan that failed when Hidetora went ahead and massacred Kaede’s whole family anyway. For her part, she’s happy to be back in Hidetora’s First Castle since it used to be her father’s castle. Kaede hates Hidetora and, from the looks of things, his entire family. The includes her husband, though given how she’s able to manipulate him, she maybe won’t mind keeping him around. And when Taro turns up dead thanks to a scheme from his shifty brother Jiro, Kaede will take right up with him herself. Kaede in the end dies at Jiro’s hands with the biggest splash of blood possible, but she dies happy knowing she brought the family down.
Kaede is basically the Edmund of this version, but while Edmund was interested in gaining power to prove a literal bastard like himself can actually do just fine, Kaede is angry about the death of her family. It sets her apart and makes her the symbol of what Hidetora earned through his five decades of constant warfare. There’s an undercurrent to Ran that basically says this is the world Hidetora built, and even as he’s trying to just live a quiet life in peaceful retirement, he can’t. The world he made won’t let him.
And, oddly enough, he knows that on some level. Jiro’s own wife, Lady Sue (Yoshiko Miyazaki), is in much the same boat as Lady Kaede, her family overthrown and her father’s castle burned to the ground. She does have a living brother in the form of Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura), a blind beggar. While Kaede hates her father-in-law, Sue does not, a fact that baffles Hidetora who even tries ordering her to hate him. But she can’t, as she thinks her lot in life was determined by karma from her previous one.
So, Hidetora made this world of violence and treachery, and he wants to live peacefully under the mistaken assumption that his sons will somehow not turn on each other. He wants to go on living with his small army of troops, his concubines, and his fool (Peter). But he can’t, he won’t, and in the end when he may finally have found a measure of peace after a degrading period of madness, that period is ended with a sniper’s bullet to his one loyal son Saburo. His life will only end in sorrow before the closing credits run, taking a lot of people with him.
And I mean a lot of people. Shakespeare’s play has a lot of things that are more or less forgotten over the course of the script. Lear’s Fool wanders off and disappears, probably because the same actor played both the Fool and Lear’s daughter Cordelia. Hidetora’s fool, on the other hand, becomes his reluctant guardian, even at one point wondering how he ended up there in his life. Likewise, Lear’s knights are mostly spoken of but never seen only to be forgotten after a point. What happened to them? I don’t know. Some productions of the play will show the Fool’s fate–some versions will show the character’s execution–but the knights? They don’t even really appear on stage aside from a handful at the most. But Hidetora’s people? Oh, they die. The soldiers and the concubines are massacred, the fool surviving only by virtue of the fact Hidetora tossed to fool out of the castle just before the attack. Likewise, Hidetora witnesses all the death, even breaking his own sword when he tries to join in, perhaps one of the most symbolic moments of the character’s time on-screen. But he lives, and he goes mad as a result.
Still, Saburo called it: this was the world his father built. Why would he expect anything else?
NEXT: Well, if Ran was an endurance test, the next film in this feature will one I look forward to revisiting. It’s proof Billy Wilder could do great work outside of comedy. Be back soon with 1944’s Double Indemnity.
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