Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Burning down the house

Been years since I saw Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and decades since I saw it projected (an unimpressive 16 mm print in an improvised theater). Watching the 2016 4K UHD restoration on the big screen forty years after its premiere is like watching a storm surge approach shore: you're confronted with an unstoppable wall stretching from end to end, and you're not sure whether to run (where to?) or fall on your knees in worship. 

And then you realize, after so many viewings, like a shock of saltwater to the face: damn, but this film is funny.

(WARNING: story and twists discussed in explicit detail)

As in bleakly funny. As in flies to wanton boys. As in godlike vantage gazing down at scattering ants.

Warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Kurosawa's ensemble actors) has apparently fallen senile: he's banished favorite son Saburo (Daisuke Ryu) for speaking the unvarnished truth and divided his kingdom among the remaining two-- the elder Taro (Akira Terao), the younger more ambitious Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu)-- for flattering him. A cruel despot punishing truthsayers and promoting asskissers, over a kingdom falling into chaos! Now where have we seen that before?

Donald Richie once described Kurosawa as Toho's best director, Japan's finest scriptwriter, and Japan's greatest editor (don't hold me to that, I'm paraphrasing from memory), and it's the second quality that comes to mind as he adapts Shakespeare's King Lear to the big screen. In the play the world that crashes down on Lear as various people step in and heap misfortune upon misfortune on his head; in Ran much of what happens to Hidetora is a consequences of all the death and destruction he has dealt out to others in the course of his rule. The rewrite shortened the original's cast of characters, clarified previously obscure motives (Why is Gloucester such a sucker? Why do the sisters fight over Edmund? Why is Edgar so unaccountably noble?), overall streamlined the narrative. For an almost three-hour film (162 minutes) the picture actually contains not a lot of fat. 

Which is crucial to comedy, in particular domestic comedy, and Lear and consequently Ran are essentially household farces with royal insignias stuck on all participants. Taro's wife Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) bumps heads with Hidetora's concubines and the great lord has to fume; later Kaede attempts to claim the family banner and first blood is drawn, by the great lord no less-- with an arrow, from a high window, the deadly shaft hissing before it claims a life (much praise has been heaped on Kurosawa for his monumental style of visual filmmaking, but little note has been made on his evocative sound effects). When Hidetora picks up his concubines and thirty warriors and leaves Taro's castle for Jiro's the scale of humiliation ramps up accordingly-- instead of loud tantrums and slammed doors we have Hidetora ordering a dozen men to slowly shove a massive castle gate open for him to depart, and when he's outside Kurosawa frames the shot just so that Hidetora is in the foreground, his son in the far background, and the dozen men sweat and strain once more to heave the huge slabs of aged wood shut between the two, dramatizing the rupture between father and son with a vast booming thud. 

Lady Kaede keeps the humor honed; gliding across polished wood floors in her constantly whispering kimono, she sounds and acts like the ghost of sins long past and in fact she's a figure out of Hidetora's own past: her castle taken from her her family massacred her own body offered as gift in marriage to eldest son Taro. She's a master of court etiquette and wields irony and innuendo with the same skill with which she wields a tanto, and she wants in increasing order of priority sex, power, revenge on the great lord.

When Hidetora wanders a wasteland with his warriors and concubines in tow the humiliation is elevated to pathos and you start to feel for the guy; when he holes up in banished Saburo's deserted castle and Jiro and Taro combine their armies to literally burn him out, the pathos achieves a cosmic scale. 

You probably won't laugh tho. The flames, the firepower, the bright spraying blood, the men crawling on the ground backs bristling with arrows like so many porcupines-- men you quietly applauded not long ago for their loyalty to Hidetora and chutzpah in defying Taro, cut down and slaughtered-- the images choke down any impulse to laugh. And yet you can still appreciate the irony of this tinpot dictator being brought low by his own sons, with soldiers he himself authorized them to use as they see fit. Toru Takemitsu's music-- the staccato drumming, the wailing flute, the chillingly distant strings-- elevate the comedy to the level of divine amusement, a joke even gods can appreciate, leaning back on their vasty thrones and chuckling at the stupidity of mortals. 

Shakespeare tragedies don't achieve their power through suffering alone, the suffering must be modulated by other emotions along the way including pride, nobility, tenderness, love. The latter is introduced early on with Saburo, who's blunt to the point of insulting; when he shuts up however he cuts out a few leafy branches and plants them next to the sleeping Hidetora to give him some shade (a wordless gesture I found unaccountably moving, especially this past scorching summer). Lady Sue is haloed by an orange setting sun, and her gentle adoration of Hidetora ("It's worse when you smile," he notes as she gazes at him) is another contrasting note to offset the gloom. But arguably it's Kyoami (Peter) who best represents the opposing forces in the film: the court jester isn't particularly funny (difficult when he's competing with even bigger fools) but he does flash his cynicism consistently like an ID badge (I'm the royal jester!) till at the nadir of his relationship with Hidetora-- when he picks up his bundle of clothes and prepares to abandon the mad lord-- he suddenly finds himself unaccountably bound to his now-helpless master, weeping at the fact that yes, he does love the senile old man after all. 

The finale leaves you with a numb coldness-- a fault, many folks say, as this is supposed to be a tragedy when really it isn't. Seeing it as tragedy's flip side I submit the film works even better: the very best dark jokes kill not just laughter but any sense of hope that things might change, that man is destined to ascend, that goodness-- and life-- ultimately triumphs. Kurosawa's film is a pained response to all that, to the humanist-idealist sentiments he's championed most of his career. Only twice has he been as darkly pessimistic, in his previous major Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood (his take on Macbeth) and in his hit of a samurai black comedy Yojimbo; this blows past those two previous masterworks and arguably even Shakespeare in terms of sheer nihilism, basically a bitter final laugh with the metallic tang of learned experience. After this he would still direct-- the anthology film Dreams, the quietly hopeful Rhapsody in August, the gently defiant Madadayo (Not Yet)-- but would never again touch on the subject, not in this manner and not on the big screen, for the remainder of his life.