Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa (screenplay), Hideo Oguni (screenplay)
Stars: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu
In Medieval Japan, an elderly
warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly
underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn
on each other... and him.
Shakespearean.
Plot
Hidetora Ichimonji, a powerful though
now elderly warlord, decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons: Taro,
Jiro, and Saburo. Taro, the eldest, will receive the prestigious First Castle
and become leader of the Ichimonji clan, while Jiro and Saburo will be given
the Second and Third Castles. Hidetora is to retain the title of Great Lord and
Jiro and Saburo are to support Taro.
Hidetora begins to lecture his sons
about the importance of unity using three arrows. He selects one arrow out of a
quiver and shows how easy it is to snap in half but three arrows bundled
together are much more durable. Saburo, however, breaks all three arrows with
his knee and calls the lecture foolish. He points out that Hidetora is foolish
if he expects his sons to be loyal to him, reminding him that even Hidetora had
previously used the most ruthless methods to attain power. Hidetora hears the
comments as being subversive, and when his servant Tango comes to Saburo's
defense, he exiles both men. Fujimaki, a visiting warlord who had witnessed
these events agrees with Saburo's frankness, and invites him to take his
daughter's hand in marriage.
Following the division of Hidetora's
lands between his remaining two sons, Taro's wife Lady Kaede begins to urge her
husband to usurp control of the entire Ichimonji clan. She is still bitter
about the loss of her family; Hidetora's army had previously killed her family
after a land dispute and then assimilated the family's lands. When Taro demands
Hidetora renounce his title of Great Lord, Hidetora then storms out of the
castle and travels to Jiro's castle, only to discover that Jiro is only
interested in using Hidetora as a titular pawn. Hidetora and his retinue then
leave Jiro's castle as well without any clear destination. Eventually Tango
appears with provisions but to no avail. Tango then tells Hidetora of Taro's
new decree: death to whoever aids his father. At last Hidetora takes refuge in
the Third Castle, abandoned after Saburo's forces followed their lord into
exile. Tango does not follow him. Kyoami, the court fool, then jokes about
Hidetora's predicament, only to be thrown out of the Third Castle.
Shortly thereafter, Hidetora and his
samurai retinue are besieged militarily by Taro and Jiro's combined forces. As
Taro and Jiro's forces storm the castle, Taro is killed by a bullet fired by
Jiro's general, Kurogane. In a short but violent siege, Hidetora's defenders
are slaughtered and the Third Castle is destroyed by fire. Hidetora is allowed
to survive though without any supplies or bodyguards and he succumbs to madness
after wandering away from the decimated castle. Hidetora is discovered
wandering in the wilderness by Kyoami and Tango, who are still loyal to him,
and stay to assist Hidetora. In his madness, Hidetora is haunted by horrific
visions of the people he destroyed in his quest for power. They take refuge in
a peasant's home only to discover that the occupant is Tsurumaru, the brother
of Lady Sué, Jiro's wife. Tsurumaru had been blinded and left impoverished
after Hidetora took over his land and killed his father, a rival lord.
With Taro dead, Jiro becomes the
Great Lord of the Ichimonji clan, enabling him to move into the First Castle.
Upon Jiro's return from battle, Lady Kaede, seemingly unfazed by Taro's death,
manipulates Jiro into having an affair with her, and undermines Jiro's power
from behind his throne. Kaede demands that Jiro kill Lady Sué and marry her
instead. Jiro orders Kurogane to do the deed, but he refuses, seeing through
Kaede's perfidy. Kurogane then warns Sué and Tsurumaru to flee. Tango, still
watching over Hidetora with Kyoami, encounters Ikoma and Ogura, who had once
served as spies for Jiro, betraying Hidetora and Taro only to be exiled. Before
he kills them both for their treason, Ikoma tells him that Jiro is considering
sending assassins after Hidetora. Alarmed, Tango rides off to alert Saburo.
Hidetora becomes even more insane and runs off into a volcanic plain with a
frantic Kyoami in pursuit.
Saburo's army crosses back into
Jiro's territory to find him. News also reaches Jiro that two rival lords
allied to Saburo (Ayabe and Fujimaki) have also entered the territory and Jiro
hastily mobilizes his army. At the field of battle, the two brothers accept a
truce, but Saburo becomes alarmed when Kyoami arrives to tell of his father's
descent into madness. Saburo goes with Kyoami to rescue his father and takes
ten warriors with him; Jiro sends several gunners to follow Saburo, offering a
bounty for whoever kills him and Hidetora. Lady Kaede has already convinced
Jiro to send another group of assassins to hunt down Sué and Tsurumaru.
Jiro then further orders an attack on
Saburo's much smaller force and Saburo's army retreats into the woods. Jiro
attempts to pursue Saburo's army in the forest but is stopped short with
significant losses due to the deadly muskets wielded by Saburo's infantry. In
the middle of the battle a messenger arrives with news that the rival warlord,
Ayabe, is marching on the First Castle, forcing Jiro's army to hastily retreat.
Saburo finds Hidetora in the volcanic
plain; Hidetora partially recovers his sanity, and begins repairing his
relationship with Saburo. However, one of the snipers Jiro had sent after
Saburo's small group shoots and kills Saburo. Overcome with grief, Hidetora
dies. Fujimaki and his army arrive from their victory only to witness Tango and
Kyoami lamenting the death of father and son.
Meanwhile, Tsurumaru and Sué arrive
at the ruins of a destroyed castle but inadvertently leave behind the flute
that Sué previously gave Tsurumaru when he was banished. She gives a picture of
Amida Buddha to him for company while she attempts to retrieve the missing
flute. It is when she returns to Tsurumaru's hovel to retrieve it that she is
ambushed and killed by Jiro's assassins.
At the same time, Ayabe's army
pursues Jiro's army to the First Castle and commences a siege. When Kurogane
hears that Lady Sué has been murdered by one of Jiro's men, he confronts Kaede.
She admits her perfidy and her plots to exact revenge against Hidetora and the
Ichimonji clan for having destroyed her family years before. Enraged, Kurogane
kills Kaede. Jiro, Kurogane, and all Jiro's men subsequently die in the battle
with Ayabe's army that follows.
Themes
The analogy of the development of Ran
to Shakespeare's King Lear extends also to the thematic elements as they
are found in the film. As with King Lear, the central theme of the film is its
thematic study of the inheritance of power intergenerationally between a
single parent and his three children. John F. Danby argues by analogy that Lear
dramatizes, among other things, the contrasting meanings of "Nature".
In Ran, the thematic study in cinematography and content of "nature"
and the "natural" are revisited numerous times from the starting
scene depicting expansive clouds to the closing scene depicting a sole figure
filmed against an expansive landscape. The "unnatural", or the word
"Ran" translated as chaos or the "disordered", occurs in
the thematically recurrent scenes of warfare and nihilism depicted throughout
the film. In analogy to Shakespeare, Kurosawa reflects a debate in
Shakespeare's time about what human nature and nature really were like. There
are thematically two strongly contrasting views of human nature in Kurosawa's
film: that of Hidetora's party (analogous to Lear, Gloucester, Albany, Kent),
and that of his older sons who come to rule (analogous to Edmund, Cornwall,
Goneril, and Regan).
As with Shakespeare, Kurosawa's film
thematically explores these two aspects of human nature. Lady Kaeda and
her husband are the new inheriting generation, members of an age of
competition, suspicion, glory, in contrast with the older society which has
come down from Hidetora and his times, with its belief in co-operation,
reasonable decency, and respect for the whole as greater than the part. Ran,
like King Lear, is thus an allegory. The older society, that of the medieval
vision, with its doting king and warlord, falls into error, and is threatened
by the new inheriting generation; it is partially regenerated and saved by a
vision of a new order, embodied in Hidetora's rejected youngest son, which
ultimately fails.
The three themes of chaos,
nihilism, and warfare recur throughout the film. With reference to chaos,
in many scenes Kurosawa foreshadows it by filming approaching cumulonimbus clouds,
which finally break into a raging storm during the castle massacre. Hidetora is
an autocrat whose powerful presence keeps the countryside unified and at peace.
His abdication frees up other characters, such as Jiro and Lady Kaede, to
pursue their own agendas, which they do with absolute ruthlessness. While the
title is almost certainly an allusion to Hidetora's decision to abdicate (and
the resulting mayhem that follows), there are other examples of the disorder of
life, what Michael Sragow calls a "trickle-down theory of anarchy". The
death of Taro ultimately elevates Lady Kaede to power and turns Jiro into an
unwilling pawn in her schemes. Saburo's decision to rescue Hidetora ultimately
draws in two rival warlords and leads to an unwanted battle between Jiro and
Saburo, culminating in the destruction of the Ichimonji clan.
The ultimate example of chaos is the absence
of gods. When Hidetora sees Lady Sué, a devout Buddhist and the most
religious character in the film, he tells her, "Buddha is gone from this
miserable world." Sué, despite her belief in love and forgiveness,
eventually has her head cut off. When Kyoami claims that the gods either do not
exist or are the cause of human suffering, Tango responds, "[The gods]
can't save us from ourselves." Kurosawa has repeated the point, saying
"humanity must face life without relying on God or Buddha". The last
shot of the film shows Tsurumaru standing on top of the ruins of his family
castle. Unable to see, he stumbles towards the edge until he almost falls over.
He drops the scroll of the Buddha his sister had given him and just stands
there, "a blind man at the edge of a precipice, bereft of his god, in a
darkening world". This may symbolize the modern concept of the death of
God, as Kurosawa also stated, "Man is perfectly alone ... [Tsurumaru]
represents modern humanity.”
In addition to its chaotic elements,
Ran also contains a strong element of nihilism, which is present from the
opening sequence, where Hidetora mercilessly hunts down a boar only to refrain
from eating it, to the last scene with Tsurumaru. Roger Ebert describes Ran as
"a 20th-century film set in medieval times, in which an old man can arrive
at the end of his life having won all his battles, and foolishly thinks he
still has the power to settle things for a new generation. But life hurries
ahead without any respect for historical continuity; his children have their
own lusts and furies. His will is irrelevant, and they will divide his spoils
like dogs tearing at a carcass."
This marked a radical departure from
Kurosawa's earlier films, many of which balanced pessimism with hopefulness.
Only Throne of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, had as bleak an
outlook. Even Kagemusha, though it chronicled the fall of the Takeda clan and
their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Nagashino, had ended on a note of
regret rather than despair. By contrast, the world of Ran is a Hobbesian world,
where life is an endless cycle of suffering and everybody is a villain or a
victim, and in many cases both. Heroes like Saburo may do the right thing, but
in the end they are doomed as well. Unlike other Kurosawa heroes, like
Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai or Watanabe from Ikiru, who die performing great
acts, Saburo dies pointlessly. Gentle characters like Lady Sué are doomed to
fall victim to the evil and violence around them, and conniving characters like
Jiro or Lady Kaede are never given a chance to atone and are predestined to a
life of wickedness culminating in violent death.
Critical reviews
Ran was critically acclaimed upon its
premiere. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval
rating of 96%, based on 78 reviews, and an average rating of 9/10. The
website's critical consensus reads, "Akira Kurosawa's sprawling, epic take
on King Lear should be required viewing for fans of westerns, war movies, or
period films in general." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average
score of 96 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "universal
acclaim".
Shawn Levy, of the Portland Oregonian
wrote, "In many respects, it's Kurosawa's most sumptuous film, a feast of
color, motion and sound: Considering that its brethren include Kagemusha, Seven
Samurai and Dersu Uzala, the achievement is extraordinary." Writing for
the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert stated, "Ran is a great,
glorious achievement." In the San Francisco Examiner, G. Allen Johnson
stated: "Kurosawa pulled out all the stops with Ran, his obsession with
loyalty and his love of expressionistic film techniques allowed to roam
freely."
Writing for the San Francisco
Chronicle, Bob Graham stated: "In Ran, the horrors of life are transformed
by art into beauty. It is finally so moving that the only appropriate response
is silence." Gene Siskel writing for the Chicago Tribune wrote:
"The physical scale of Ran is overwhelming. It's almost as if Kurosawa is
saying to all the cassette buyers of America, in a play on Clint Eastwood's phrase,
'Go ahead, ruin your night'—wait to see my film on a small screen and cheat
yourself out of what a movie can be." Vincent Canby writing for The New
York Times stated: "Though big in physical scope and of a beauty that
suggests a kind of drunken, barbaric lyricism, 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."
Roger Ebert awarded the film four out
of four stars, with extended commentary, "Kurosawa (while directing Ran)
often must have associated himself with the old lord as he tried to put this
film together, but in the end he has triumphed, and the image I have of him, at
75, is of three arrows bundled together." In 2000, it was inducted
into Ebert's Great Movies list.
Michal Sragow writing for Salon in
2000 summarized the Shakespearean origins of the play: "Kurosawa's Lear is
a 16th century warlord who has three sons and a career studded with conquests.
Kurosawa's genius is to tell his story so that every step suggests how wild and
savage a journey it has been. At the start, this bold, dominating figure, now
called Hidetora, is a sacred monster who wants to be a sort of warlord
emeritus. He hopes to bequeath power to his oldest son while retaining his own
entourage and emblems of command. He hasn't reckoned with the ambition of his
successor or the manipulative skill of his heir's wife, who goes for the sexual
and political jugular of anyone who invades her sphere."
Ran was nominated for Academy Awards
for art direction, cinematography, costume design (which it won), and
Kurosawa's direction. It was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign
Language Film. In Japan, Ran was conspicuously not nominated for "Best
Picture" at the Awards of the Japanese Academy. However, it won two
prizes, for best art direction and best music score, and received four other
nominations, for best cinematography, best lighting, best sound, and best
supporting actor (Hitoshi Ueki, who played Saburo's patron, Lord Fujimaki). Ran
won two awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, for best
foreign language film and best make-up artist, and was nominated for best
cinematography, best costume design, best production design, and best
screenplay–adapted. Despite its limited commercial success at the time of its
release, the film's accolades have improved greatly, and it is now regarded as
one of Kurosawa's masterpieces.
Ran won Best Director and Best
Foreign Film awards from the National Board of Review, a Best Film award and a
Best Cinematography award (Takao Saitō, Shōji Ueda, and Asakazu Nakai) from the
National Society of Film Critics, a Best Foreign Language Film award from the
New York Film Critics Circle, a Best Music award (Toru Takemitsu) and a Best
Foreign Film award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, a Best Film
award and a Best Cinematography award from the Boston Society of Film Critics,
a Best Foreign Feature award from the Amanda Awards from Norway, a Blue Ribbon
Award for Best Film, a Best European Film award from the Bodil Awards, a Best
Foreign Director award from the David di Donatello Awards, a Joseph Plateau
Award for Best Artistic Contribution, a Director of the Year award and a Foreign
Language Film of the Year award from the London Critics Circle Film Awards, a
Best Film, a Best Supporting Actor (Hisashi Igawa) and a Best Director from the
Mainichi Film Concours, and an OCIC award from the San Sebastian Film
Festival.The film was selected in BBC's list of 100 greatest foreign
language films by 209 critics of 43 countries around the world in 2018.