Review of Ran (1985) by Sergiy S — 03 Feb 2011

King Lear remake or Akira Kurosawa biopic? Maybe both, and either way, it's the most entertaining, engrossing, and engaging Shakespeare that I've ever seen, and a completely believeable allegory for a life of mistakes regretted.

The story of King Lear is well known: an ageing king divides his kingdom between two fawning daughters and excommunicates the third who dares to tell the truth. In time, he lives to regret his decision, discovering during a descent into madness that, to paraphrase Junius, the subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate does not flatter.

As a piece of cinema, it's hard to fault Ran. Although the near-3 hour running time seems daunting, the telling of the story rarely drags. Where Shakespeare sometimes loses you in a barrage of Dukes and Earls of various bits of England and navel-gazing soliloquies, Kurosawa's streamlined Lear keeps us focussed on the matter at hand and the key players. The addition of the viscerally evil Kaede (or is she?), while sure to disappoint Lear purists, adds complexity beyond pure greed as motivation for the villains. The scenery and visuals are stunning, from the castles (ruined or not), to the Japanese mountain-scape, to the desert. The score is well judged, never intrusive and never sounding a wrong note.

The acting too is faultless. The minor characters are rich and complex, struggling with their decisions, balancing loyalty and honour, greed and lust; never one-dimensional, never purely detestable nor loveable. And Hidetora (Lear) himself is a simply stunningly brilliant portrayal of madness - madness that comes from realizing that his own miserable fate is entirely of his own making. To err is human; to realize that your error has cost you everything you love is the road to madness, and the portrayal here is entirely convincing.

So is it Lear? Not in any conventional sense. But stripped of the arcane language, transposed to a different place, and with subtle tweaks to motivation and morality, this is the most accessible Lear I've ever experienced; I truly felt that I understood the point of the play after I saw Ran in a way that a straight reading or literalist film adaptation won't achieve. And is it a biopic? If so, perhaps we can understand the tortured soul of Kurosawa a little better through this, surely his masterwork.