Ran (乱, "Chaos") is a 1985 Jidaigeki film written and directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. It is based on William Shakespeare's King Lear adapted to the setting of Sengoku-era Japan. It follows the fall of Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), an aging warlord who decides to abdicate as ruler in favor of his three sons. His kingdom slowly disintegrates, as each son jockies for power, murdering their rivals and laying waste to the land. Hidetora eventually goes insane after watching his retainers slaughtered in an epic massacre that is the centerpiece of the film. As the kingdom crumbles and rival warlords move in for the kill, the Ichimonji clan collapses in a culmination of revenge and betrayal as old scores are finally settled.
| Ran | |
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| File:Ran (film) poster.jpg | |
| Directed by | Akira Kurosawa |
| Written by | Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide |
| Produced by | Katsumi Furukawa |
| Starring | Tatsuya Nakadai, Mieko Harada |
| Music by | Tôru Takemitsu |
| Distributed by | Greenwich Film Productions Herald Ace Inc. Nippon Herald Films |
Release dates | 01 June, 1985 |
Running time | 160 minutes |
| Language | Japanese |
| Budget | $12,000,000 |
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The film is believed by many to be one of Kurosawa's finest. It has been hailed for its powerful images and expert use of colour, and Costume designer, Emi Wada won the Academy Award for Costume Design in 1985. The distinctive film score was written by Toru Takemitsu, and in many scenes it plays in isolation, with the normal sound muted - particularly in the scene when Hidetora's castle is destroyed.
Plot
At its core, Ran is a film about loss. It chronicles the downfall of the once-powerful Ichimonji clan after its patriarch Hidetora decides to give control of his kingdom up to his three sons: Taro, Jiro, and Saburo. Taro, as the eldest son, 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. Jiro and Saburo are to support Taro, and Hidetora illustrates this by using a bundle of arrows.[1] Hidetora will remain the titular leader and retain the title of Great Lord. However, Saburo criticizes the logic of Hidetora's plan, claiming that Hidetora achieved power through treachery, yet he foolishly expects his sons to be loyal to him. Hidetora mistakes these comments for a threat and when his servant Tango comes to Saburo's defense, Hidetora banishes both of them.
Following Hidetora's abdication, Taro's wife Lady Kaede begins pushing for Taro to take direct control of the Ichimonji clan, and engineers a rift between Taro and Hidetora. Matters come to a head when Hidetora kills one of Taro's guards who was threatening his fool Kyoami. When Taro subsequently demands that Hidetora renounce his title of Great Lord, Hidetora storms out of the castle. He then travels to Jiro's castle, only to discover that Jiro is more interested in using Hidetora as a pawn in his own power play. Finally Hidetora journies to the third castle, which had been abandoned after Saburo's forces followed their lord into exile, only to be ambushed by Taro and Jiro. In a horrific massacre that is the centerpiece of the film, Hidetora's bodyguards and concubines are slaughtered, the castle is set on fire, and Hidetora is left to commit seppuku (ritual suicide). As Taro and Jiro's forces storm the castle, Jiro's general Kurogane has Taro assassinated.
However, much to his dismay, Hidetora's sword has been broken, and he can therefore not commit seppuku. Instead of killing himself, Hidetora goes mad and escapes from the burning castle. He is discovered wandering in the wilderness by Tango and Kyoami, who along with Saburo become the only people still loyal to him. They take refuge in a peasant's home, only to discover that the peasant is a man named Tsurumaru, Lady Sué's brother (and Hidetora's son-in-law), whom Hidetora had ordered blinded years ago. Upon his return from battle, Jiro begins having an affair with Lady Kaede, who quickly becomes the power behind his throne. She demands that Jiro divorce his wife Lady Sué and marry her instead. When he does so, she also demands for good measure that he have Sue killed. Kurogane is given the order, but he publicly disobeys and warns Jiro not to trust his wife. Meanwhile, Hidetora's party hides out in the remains of a castle that Hidetora and destroyed in an earlier war. During a fracas in which Tango kills two men from Hidetora's bodyguard who had previously betrayed him, Hidetora flees back into the wilderness.
With Hidetora's ___location a mystery, Saburo's army crosses back into the kingdom to find him. Alarmed at what he suspects is treachery, Jiro hastily mobilizes his army to stop him. The two forces meet on the field of Hachiman. Sensing a major battle, Saburo's new patron, a warlord named Fujimaki marches to the border. Another rival warlord, Ayabe, also shows up with his own army. After arranging a truce with Jiro, Saburo rides off to find Hidetora. But Jiro orders an attack anyway, and his forces are decimated by arquebus fire from Saburo's army. In the middle of the battle, word reaches Jiro and Kurogane that Fujimaki has slipped away and is marching on the First Castle. Jiro's army promptly disintegrates and flees back to the castle, where Kurogane slays Lady Kaede after she admits that she herself had planned for events to transpire this way all along. Jiro, Kurogane, and Jiro's men all die in the battle that follows, presumably. During this period Lady Sué is also finally murdered by one of Jiro's men.
In the end, Saburo finally discovers Hidetora, hiding in a cave. The two are reunited and Hidetora comes to his senses. However, Saburo is promptly killed by an assassin that Jiro had sent out earlier. Overcome with grief, Hidetora finally dies, marking the end of the Ichimonji clan. The film ends with a shot of Tsurumaru, standing alone on top of a ruined castle while Saburo's army mourns for their fallen leader.
Background
Ran was the final film of Kurosawa's "third period", which lasted from 1965 - 1985. During this time, he had difficulty securing financial support for his pictures, and was frequently forced to seek foreign backing. While he had directed over twenty films in the first two decades of his career, the third period saw him direct just four. After directing 1965's Red Beard, Kurosawa discovered that he was considered old-fashioned, and did not work again for almost five years. He also found himself competing against television, which had gutted Japanese film audiences from a high of 1.1 billion in 1958 to under 200 million by 1975. In 1968 he was fired from the 20th Century Fox epic Tora! Tora! Tora! over what he called creative differences, but others said was a perfectionism that bordered on insanity. Kurosawa tried to start an independent production group with three other directors, but his 1970 film Dodesukaden was a box office flop and bankrupted the company.[2] Many of his younger rivals boasted that he was finished. A year later, unable to secure any domestic funding and plagued by ill-health, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. Though he survived, his misfortune would continue to plague him until the late 1980s. By the time he directed Ran, he was almost completely blind; to make matters worse, his wife of forty years, Yôko Yaguchi, would later die while he was filming Ran.
Kurosawa first got the idea that would become Ran in the mid-Seventies, when he read a parable about the Sengoku-era warlord Mori Motonari. Motonari was famous for having three sons, all incredibly loyal and talented in their own right. Kurosawa began imagining what would have happened had they been bad. While a similar story is the plot of Shakespeare's play King Lear, Kurosawa only became aware of the similarities after he had already started pre-planning. According to him, the stories of Mori Motonari and Lear merged in a way he was never fully able to explain. He wrote the script shortly after filming Dersu Uzala in 1975, and then "let it sleep" for seven years. During this time, he storyboarded every shot in the film in paintings (The resulting collection of images was published with the screenplay) and continued searching for funding. Following his success with 1980's Kagemusha, which he sometimes called a "dress rehearsal" for Ran, Kurosawa was able to secure backing from French producer Serge Silberman.
Production
Ran was Kurosawa's last epic film and by far his most expensive. The film used approximately 1,400 extras, which required 1,400 uniforms and suits of armor to be fabricated. These were designed by Costume designer, Emi Wada, and Kurosawa, and were hand-made by master tailors, taking over 2 years to make. The film also used 200 horses, a number of which had to be imported from the United States.[3] Kurosawa loved filming in lush and expansive locations, and most of Ran was shot amidst the mountains and plains of Mount Aso, Japan's largest active volcano. Kurosawa was also granted permission to shoot at two of the country's most famous landmarks, the ancient castles at Kumamoto and Himeji. Hidetora's third castle, which was burned to the ground, was actually a real building which he built on the slopes of Mount Fuji. No miniatures were used for that segment, and Tatsuya Nakadai had to do the scene where Hidetora flees the castle in one take. Apparently, Kurosawa also wanted to include a scene that required an entire field to be sprayed gold; it was filmed but Kurosawa cut it out of the final film during editing.
Kurosawa would often shoot a scene with three cameras simultaneously, each using different lenses and angles. Many long-shots were employed throughout the film and very few close-ups. On several occasions he used static cameras and suddenly brought the action into frame, rather than using the camera to track the action. He also used jump cuts to progress certain scenes, changing the pace of the action for filmic effect.[4]
- Akira Kurosawa's wife of 39 years, Yôko Yaguchi, died during the production of this film. Kurosawa halted filming for just one day to mourn before resuming work on the picture.
Cast and Characters
Ran was a late Kurosawa film and so it lacked many stalwarts of earlier Kurosawa films, such as Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. The description of Hidetora in the first script was originally based on Mifune, who had been estranged from Kurosawa since Red Beard.[5] However, for various reasons the part ultimately went to Tatsuya Nakadai, who had played several supporting characters in previous Kurosawa films, as well as the thief in Kagemusha. However, because the character had been been written for Mifune, Nakadai found himself playing Toshiro Mifune playing Hidetora. Two other Kurosawa vetans in Ran were Hisashi Igawa (Kurogane) and Masayuki Yui (Tango), who were both in Dreams and Madadayo (Yuki had also been in Kagemusha and Igawa would later appear in Rhapsody in August). Many of the other actors had also appeared in other late Kurosawa films, such as Jinpachi Nezu (Jiro) and Daisuke Ryu (Saburo) in Kagemusha. Others had not, but would go on to work with Kurosawa again, such as Akira Terao (Taro) and Mieko Harada (Lady Kaede) in Dreams. For more humorous elements, Kurosawa also brought in two comedians: the transvestite Shinnosuke "Peter" Ikehata as Hidetora's fool Kyoami and Hitoshi Ueki as rival warlord Nobuhiro Fujimaki.
Themes
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Reception
In the later years of his career, Kurosawa got little respect from many Japanese filmmakers and the industry. A glaring sign of this was Japan's failure to submit Ran for competition in the Best Foreign Language Film category of the Oscars. Kurosawa had not attended the Tokyo Film Festival, where the film premiered, and many people felt the snub to Ran was payback. The film's producer and financier, Serge Silberman, tried to get it nominated as a French co-production (which it was) but failed. American director Sidney Lumet helped organize a campaign to have Kurosawa nominated as Best Director. Kurosawa got the nomination, but the winner that year in the director category was Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa. [6]
Ran was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design (which it won).
Footnotes
- ^ This is based on a parable by Mori Motonari: he handed each of his sons an arrow and asked for them to snap it. After each snapped their arrows, he showed three arrows and asked them to snap them. Unable to snap them, Motonari preached how one arrow could be broken easily but three arrows could not. However, in Ran Saburo smashed the bundle across his knee and called the lesson stupid.
- ^ Prince, p.5
- ^ Internet Movie Database
- ^ http://jclarkmedia.com/film/filmreviewran.html
- ^ http://www2.tky.3web.ne.jp/~adk/kurosawa/filmo/ran.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/kurosawa/asktheexpert/answers.html - ^ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/kurosawa/asktheexpert/answers.html
References
- Prince, Stephen (1999). The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-6910-1046-3.
External links
- Ran at IMDb
- Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- Boston Herald interview with Akira Kurosawa (July 1986)
- TheGline.com Review
- Michael Wilmington essay at criterionco.com
- Review at Toho Kingdom by Miles Imhoff
- King Lear in Film Compares and contrasts Ran with King Lear.
- Film View: 'Ran' Weathers the Seasons by Vincent Canby. New York Times review from 1986.
- See the trailer for Ran at VideoDetective.Com.