FILM FRENZY

Ran (Photos: Toho)

By Matt Brunson

(This new feature is part of a rotating series that digs into the past and uncovers a movie as follows: Two-Star Tuesday for a movie that earns either two or two-and-a-half stars; One-Star Wednesday for a movie that earns either one or one-and-a-half stars; Three-Star Thursday for a movie that earns either three or three-and-a-half stars; and Four-Star Friday for a movie that earns four stars.)

RAN (1985)
★★★★ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Akira Kurosawa
STARS Tatsuya Nadakai, Akira Terao

Director Akira Kurosawa’s late-career achievement Ran ranks as one of the all-time greats, a foreign-language production that deserves mention in the same breath with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and Kurosawa’s own The Seven Samurai.

Arriving 35 years after Rashomon, the movie that catapulted Kurosawa into the international spotlight, this extravagant work — at the time the most expensive film in Japanese history — demonstrated that, even at the age of 75, the grand old master had lost none of his ability to spin a deeply absorbing tale. Using Shakespeare’s King Lear as a starting point, Ran (which translates as “chaos”) tells the story of Hidetora (Tatsuya Nadakai), a 70-year-old warlord whose decision to divide his kingdom between his three sons leads to tragic consequences for all concerned.

Even upon its original release 40 years ago, critics compared the picture to seminal works by D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, profuse reverence which was merely Ran’s rightful claim. This is moviemaking on a grand scale, and the battle scene that arrives at exactly the one-hour mark of this 160-minute picture remains the greatest ever committed to celluloid (the impressive opening of Saving Private Ryan immediately had to settle for second place at best). Yet for all the spectacle, the personal implications of the story prove to be equally haunting, with rich performances driving the proceedings — as the villainous wife of one of the sons, Mieko Harada delivers a frightening, formidable performance that can make a grown man shudder.

Drawing from both Shakespeare’s text and his own country’s rich history — but passing both through his own sensibilities — Kurosawa managed to fashion a movie that embodies that most overriding of cinematic oxymorons: an intimate epic.

Ran swept the major U.S. critics’ group prizes, but Kurosawa’s prickly relationship with his own country’s film industry meant that the movie absurdly wasn’t Japan’s submission for that year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It still managed to land nominations for Best Director, Cinematography, Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Costume Design, winning the latter.