The Lesson of the Master Ran

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

An old man, a great and brutal warrior in his day and now the monarch of all he surveys from the windswept hilltop where his hunting party has paused to rest, announces a plan he has long contemplated. It is time, he says, to renounce his power. He will divide his holdings among his three children and appoint the eldest head of his house. The youngest, the one who loves him most selflessly, resists the idea and is angrily banished from the realm. By the time the ensuing tragedy has played out, the patriarch is a madman wandering the wilderness, all three children are dead, and their world, racked by civil war, is a smoldering ruin.

Yes, of course, King Lear. But wait. The great lord is called Hidetora, and he speaks in a tongue Will Shakespeare would not have recognized, inhabits a landscape unknown to the Bard, that of 16th century Japan. And Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are here men called Taro, Jiro and Saburo. We are obviously far from the place of this tragic tale's mythic birth and noble retelling, and we are far from the inert reverence of the typical movie adaptation of a classic. Indeed, in Ran (which means "chaos" in Japanese) we venture into a territory where the very word adaptation distorts and diminishes both intention and accomplishment. For what Akira Kurosawa has done is to reimagine Lear in terms of his own philosophy, which blends strains of Western existentialism with a sort of elegiac Buddhism, and the imperatives of the movies. If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects. At 75, with such films as Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo already installed furnishings of the modern sensibility, Kurosawa is not only the master of his own medium but, more important, of his own mind as well.

What he nourished there for the decade between writing and shooting Ran was a dream that inevitably obsesses (and generally defeats) most great filmmakers: the creation of a work that realizes cinema's unique capacity for the sweeping epic gesture. The problem in realizing what may be the movie's ideal form is to keep one's balance. Reach too far in one direction, and all you do is bring on the empty horses. Restrain the impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that the most haunting figures in film history--Griffith, Eisenstein and Abel Gance among them--have both lost themselves and found themselves. It is this terrain Kurosawa confidently bestrides in Ran.

The source of his triumph is his viewpoint. Great tragic figures generally demand close-ups as a divine right, so that the audience can read the play of noble emotions in their features. In Ran, that shot scarcely exists. Kurosawa's cameras (he usually covers each scene with three) are always pulled back into godlike positions, and they provide a new perspective on the rages and the ultimate madness of Tatsuya Nakadai's Lear figure. From above and beyond, we perceive him not as a great man falling but as a fragile, all too human stumbler. Distance lends an analogous irony to the scenes in which his older sons and their advisers--among them a hypnotic Kurosawa invention, Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), wife of Taro, lover of Jiro and a woman demonically possessed by vengeful needs of her own--meet to scheme multiple betrayals. Their still, geometrically formal groupings imply the characters' deluded faith that they are engaged in rational enterprises, when, of course, they are sowing anarchy's seeds.

Kurosawa visualizes his great battle scenes similarly. They begin in heartbreaking beauty, the banners and uniforms of the soldiers vivid against the dark ground where they maneuver for position in patterns as stylized as chess moves. This naturally intensifies the horror of the ensuing carnage, the mad tangle of flailing, falling bodies, of spurting blood and hacked-off limbs, in which the question of whether a man lives or dies is entirely a matter of chance. In what is perhaps his greatest coup, Kurosawa plays much of the film's central battle in a total silence infinitely more terrifying than any human cry. As he says, from where they sit the gods might be able to see this madness, but its sounds would not carry to their ears.

By placing us in their laps, Kurosawa invites us to contemplate this fact: every action we take has its effect on people we cannot see from our normal positions as groundlings. But in lifting us to these heights, he has, miraculously, not distanced our emotions. Somehow, each figure in the vast canvas has a particular and touching life of his own. Kurosawa gives the last shots of Ran to one of these minor victims of great men's grand designs. A blind youth has lost the flute that was the sole consolation for his affliction and the painting of Buddha that was his talisman. Now he wanders to the edge of a precipice, oblivious of being poised unseeing between life and death. His condition symbolizes for Kurosawa the human condition. The fusion of metaphorical weight and simple beauty in these shots also summarizes Ran's greatness. Outrage has already been voiced that partly because of industry politics in Japan, the movie has been denied an Oscar nomination as best foreign film. But in fact Ran is beyond such transitory concerns. It is a film that already belongs to the ages.