Ran (乱^?, Japanese for "rebellion", "uprising" or "revolt", or to mean "disturbed" or "confused") is a 1985 Japanese-French jidaigeki epic film written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film stars Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging Sengoku-era warlord who decides to abdicate as ruler in favor of his three sons. It also stars Mieko Harada as the wife of Ichimonji's eldest son. The story is based on legends of the daimyo Mōri Motonari, as well as on the Shakespearean tragedy King Lear.

Ran was Kurosawa's last epic. With a budget of $12 million, it was the most expensive Japanese film ever produced up to that time.^[1] Ran was released on May 31, 1985 at the Tokyo International Film Festival and on June 1, 1985 in Japan. The film was hailed for its powerful images and use of color—costume designer Emi Wada won an Academy Award for Costume Design for her work on Ran. The distinctive Gustav Mahler-inspired film score, written by Tōru Takemitsu, plays in isolation with ambient sound muted.

Plot[link]

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Ran is "a relentless chronicle of base lust for power, betrayal of the father by his sons, and pervasive wars and murders that destroy all the main characters."^[2] It is a tale about 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, the eldest, 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. Hidetora will remain the titular leader and retain the title of Great Lord. Jiro and Saburo are to support Taro, and Hidetora illustrates this by using a bundle of arrows.^[3] Saburo criticizes the logic of Hidetora's plan. Hidetora achieved power through violence and treachery, he reminds his father, 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, he banishes both of them. Later, Fujimaki, a warlord who had witnessed these events, invites Saburo to his dominions and offers him his daughter to marry.

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. Lady Kaede resents Hidetora for massacring her family in a previous war and forcing her to marry Taro. 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. Hidetora and his escort leave Jiro's castle to wander, finding no food in the villages abandoned by the peasants. Eventually Tango appears with provisions. In a moment of anger Hidetora orders his escort to burn the villages down. Tango intervenes and Hidetora learns from him of Taro's decree: death to whomever aids his father. Hidetora journeys thus to the Third Castle, which had been abandoned after Saburo's forces followed their lord into exile. Tango and Kyoami only do not follow him.

They take shelter in the castle only to be ambushed by the combined forces of Taro and Jiro. In a horrific massacre that is the centerpiece of the film, all of Hidetora's bodyguards fall in battle, two of his concubines stab each other to death in a mutual suicide, the others are shot during the storming, and the castle is set on fire. Hidetora is left to commit seppuku. However, to his dismay, Hidetora's sword has been broken and he cannot. Instead of killing himself, Hidetora has a psychotic episode and wanders away from the burning castle, his attackers unable to kill him because of their low status and too awe-struck by his transformation to stop him. As Taro and Jiro's forces storm the castle, Jiro's general Kurogane assassinates Taro by shooting him down in the confusion of the battle.

Hidetora is discovered wandering in the wilderness by Tango and Kyoami, who along with Saburo remain the only people still loyal to him. They take refuge in a peasant's home only to discover that the occupant is Tsurumaru, the brother of Lady Sué (Hidetora's daughter-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 that he have Sué killed. Kurogane is given the order but he publicly disobeys and warns Jiro not to trust his wife. Instead he warns Sue and Tsurumaru to flee, who will eventually reach their former home, a ruined castle that Hidetora had destroyed in an earlier war. Meanwhile, Hidetora's party hides out in the remains of the same castle.

At one point Tango chases two men from Hidetora's bodyguard who he discovers had betrayed their former master. As Tango fights and kills the two traitors, one of them says that Jiro is talking of trying to hunt down and kill Hidetora, and since Hidetora refuses with terror to meet his youngest son, Tango rides off to bring Saburo to Hidetora instead, while Kyoami stays to assist the mad man. In his madness Hidetora is haunted by horrific visions of the people he destroyed in his quest for power. The insanity finally becomes too much for him to bear; eluding his servant, he flees into the wilderness.

With Hidetora's location a mystery and his plight now known, Saburo's army crosses back into the kingdom to find him. Alarmed at what he suspects is treachery by Saburo and by the entry of two rival warlords on Saburo's side, Jiro hastily mobilizes his army to stop them. The two forces meet on the field of Hachiman. Sensing a major battle, Saburo's new patron 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. Against the advice of Kurogane, Jiro orders an attack, and his forces are decimated by arquebus fire from Saburo's army, who had fled into the nearby wilderness for cover. In the middle of the battle, word reaches Jiro and Kurogane that Ayabe has slipped away with much of his army and is marching on the First Castle. Jiro's army promptly disintegrates and flees back to the castle.

In the end, Saburo finds Hidetora. The two are reunited and Hidetora comes to his senses. However, Saburo is promptly shot and killed by shooters that Jiro had sent out earlier. Overcome with grief, Hidetora dies, marking the end of the Ichimonji clan.

When Kurogane hears that Lady Sué has been finally murdered by one of Jiro's men, Kurogane beheads Lady Kaede after she admits that all of her actions were to avenge herself against the Ichimonji clan and destroy it.

Jiro, Kurogane, and all Jiro's men die in the battle with Ayabe's army that follows.

The film ends with a shot of Tsurumaru, blind and alone, on top of the ruined castle.

Development[link]

When I read that three arrows together are invincible, that's not true. I started doubting, and that's when I started thinking: the house was prosperous and the sons were courageous. What if this fascinating man had bad sons?

—Akira Kurosawa, July 1986^[4]

Kurosawa first got the idea that would become Ran in the mid-1970s, when he read a parable about the Sengoku-era warlord Mōri 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.^[4] Despite the similarities to Shakespeare's play King Lear, Kurosawa only became aware of the similarities after he had started pre-planning. According to him, the stories of Mōri 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.^[5] During this time, he painted storyboards of every shot in the film, later published with the screenplay and available as an extra on the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film, and continued searching for funding. Following his success with 1980's Kagemusha, which he sometimes called a "dress rehearsal" for Ran, Kurosawa was finally able to secure backing from French producer Serge Silberman.

Kurosawa once said "Hidetora is me," and there is some evidence in the film that Hidetora serves as a stand-in for Kurosawa.^[6] Roger Ebert agrees, arguing that Ran "may be as much about Kurosawa's life as Shakespeare's play."^[7] Ran was the final film of Kurosawa's "third period" (1965–1985), a time where he had difficulty securing support for his pictures, and was frequently forced to seek foreign financial backing. While he had directed over twenty films in the first two decades of his career, he directed just four in these two decades. After directing Red Beard (1965), 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 reduced 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 described as 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.^[8] 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.

King Lear and the Fool in the Storm by William Dyce.

Kurosawa was influenced by the William Shakespeare play King Lear borrowed elements from it. Both depict an aging warlord who decides to divide up his kingdom among his offspring. Hidetora has three sons — Taro, Jiro, and Saburo who correspond to Lear's daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. In both, the warlord foolishly banishes anyone who disagrees with him as a matter of pride — in Lear it is the Earl of Kent and Cordelia; in Ran it is Tango and Saburo. The conflict in both is that two of the lord's children ultimately turn against him, while the third supports him, though Hidetora's sons are far more ruthless than Goneril and Regan. Both King Lear and Ran end with the death of the entire family, including the lord.

However, there are some crucial differences between the two. King Lear is a play about undeserved suffering, and Lear himself is at worst a fool. Hidetora, by contrast, has been a cruel warrior for most of his life: a man who ruthlessly murdered men, women, and children to achieve his goals.^[9] In the film, Lady Kaede, Lady Sué, and Tsurumaru were all victims of Hidetora. Whereas in King Lear the character of Gloucester had his eyes gouged out by Lear's enemies, in Ran it was Hidetora himself who gave the order to do the same to Tsurumaru. A reviewer notes that Kurosawa had expanded the role of the Fool into a major character (Kyoami), played by a transvestite pop star, Peter; and that Lady Kaede was the equivalent of Shakespeare's Goneril but with a more complex and important character.^[10] Kurosawa was also concerned that Shakespeare gave his characters no past, and he wanted to give King Lear a history.^[11]

Production[link]

Ran was Kurosawa's last epic film and by far his most expensive. At the time, its budget of $12 million made it the most expensive Japanese film in history.^[12] Filming of Ran started in 1983.^[13] The 1,400 uniforms and suits of armor used for the extras were designed by costume designer Emi Wada and Kurosawa, and were hand-made by master tailors over more than two years. The film also used 200 horses. 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. For the castle of Lady Sué's family, he used the ruins of the Azusa castle.^[5] Hidetora's third castle, which was burned to the ground, was actually a real building which Kurosawa 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.^[5] 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. The filming of this scene can be seen in the documentary A.K..

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.^[10]

Akira Kurosawa's wife of 39 years, Yōko Yaguchi, died during the production of this film. He halted filming for just one day to mourn before resuming work on the picture.

Acting style[link]

While most of the characters in Ran are portrayed by conventional acting techniques, two performances are reminiscent of Japanese Noh theater. The heavy, ghost-like makeup worn by Tatsuya Nakadai's character, Hidetora, resembles the emotive masks worn by traditional Noh performers. The body language exhibited by the same character is also typical of Noh theater: long periods of static motion and silence, followed by an abrupt, sometimes violent, change in stance. The character of Lady Kaede is also Noh-influenced. The Noh treatment emphasizes the ruthless, passionate, and single-minded natures of these two characters.

Casting[link]

The description of Hidetora in the first script was originally based on Toshiro Mifune.^[11] However, the role was cast to Tatsuya Nakadai, an actor who had played several supporting characters in previous Kurosawa films, as well as Shingen and his "kagemusha", "double", in Kagemusha. Two other Kurosawa veterans in Ran were Hisashi Igawa (Kurogane) and Masayuki Yui (Tango), who were both in Dreams and Madadayo (Yui 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. He also hired two comedians for lighter moments: Shinnosuke "Peter" Ikehata as Hidetora's fool Kyoami and Hitoshi Ueki as rival warlord Nobuhiro Fujimaki. Kurosawa hired approximately 1,400 extras.

Music[link]

Composer Tōru Takemitsu originally wanted to use human voices as music for Ran. However, Kurosawa decided to have Takemitsu write a score influenced by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.^[14]

Kurosawa wanted the London Symphony Orchestra to perform the score for Ran. Upon meeting conductor Hiroyuki Iwaki of the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra, he engaged Iwaki and the orchestra to record the score.^[15] Kurosawa made the orchestra play up to 40 takes of the music.^[15]

Themes[link]

Chaos[link]

A terrible scroll of Hell is shown depicting the fall of the castle. There are no real sounds as the scroll unfolds like a daytime nightmare. It is a scene of human evildoing, the way of the demonic Ashura, as seen by a Buddha in tears. The music superimposed on these pictures is, like the Buddha's heart, measured in beats of profound anguish, the chanting of a melody full of sorrow that begins like sobbing and rises gradually as it is repeated, like karmic cycles, then finally sounds like the wailing of countless Buddhas.

—Ran Screenplay^[16]

The central theme to the film is chaos; in many scenes Kurosawa foreshadows it by filming approaching cumulonimbus clouds, which finally break into a raging storm during the castle massacre. Hidetora is an autocrat whose powerful presence keeps the countryside unified and at peace. His abdication frees up other characters, such as Jiro and Lady Kaede, to pursue their own agendas, which they do with absolute ruthlessness. While the title is almost certainly an allusion to Hidetora's decision to abdicate (and the resulting mayhem that follows), there are other examples of the disorder of life, what Michael Sragow calls a "trickle-down theory of anarchy."^[17] Kurogane's assassination of Taro ultimately elevates Lady Kaede to power and turns Jiro into an unwilling pawn in her schemes. Saburo's decision to rescue Hidetora ultimately draws in two rival warlords and leads to an unwanted battle between Jiro and Saburo, culminating in the destruction of the Ichimonji clan.

The ultimate example of chaos is the absence of gods. When Hidetora sees Lady Sué, a devout Buddhist and the most religious character in the film, he tells her, "Buddha is gone from this miserable world." Sué, despite her belief in love and forgiveness, eventually has her head cut off. When Kyoami claims that the gods either do not exist or are the cause of human suffering, Tango responds, "[The gods] can't save us from ourselves." Kurosawa has repeated the point, saying "humanity must face life without relying on God or Buddha."^[4] The last shot of the film shows Tsurumaru standing on top of the ruins of his family castle. Unable to see, he stumbles towards the edge until he almost falls over. He drops the scroll of the Buddha his sister had given him and just stands there, "a blind man at the edge of a precipice, bereft of his god, in a darkening world."^[18] This may symbolize the modern concept of the death of God, as Kurosawa also claimed "Man is perfectly alone... [Tsurumaru] represents modern humanity."^[5]

Nihilism[link]

What I was trying to get at in Ran, and this was there from the script stage, was that the gods or God or whoever it is observing human events is feeling sadness about how human beings destroy each other, and powerlessness to affect human beings' behavior.

—Akira Kurosawa^[17]

In addition to its chaotic elements, Ran also contains a strong element of nihilism, which is present from the opening sequence, where Hidetora mercilessly hunts down a boar only to refrain from eating it, to the last scene with Tsurumaru. Roger Ebert describes Ran as "a 20th-century film set in medieval times, in which an old man can arrive at the end of his life having won all his battles, and foolishly think he still has the power to settle things for a new generation. But life hurries ahead without any respect for historical continuity; his children have their own lusts and furies. His will is irrelevant, and they will divide his spoils like dogs tearing at a carcass."^[7]

This marked a radical departure from Kurosawa's earlier films, many of which balanced pessimism with hopefulness. Only Throne of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, had as bleak an outlook. Even Kagemusha, though it chronicled the fall of the Takeda clan and their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Nagashino, had ended on a note of regret rather than despair. By contrast, the world of Ran is a Hobbesian world, where life is an endless cycle of suffering and everybody is a villain or a victim, and in many cases both. Heroes like Saburo may do the right thing, but in the end they are doomed as well. Unlike other Kurosawa heroes, like Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai or Watanabe from Ikiru, who die performing great acts, Saburo dies pointlessly. Gentle characters like Lady Sué are doomed to fall victim to the evil and violence around them, and conniving characters like Jiro or Lady Kaede are never given a chance to atone and are predestined to a life of wickedness culminating in violent death.^[19]

Warfare[link]

All the technological progress of these last years has only taught human beings how to kill more of each other faster. It's very difficult for me to retain a sanguine outlook on life under such circumstances.

—Akira Kurosawa^[20]

According to Michael Wilmington, Kurosawa told him that much of the film was a metaphor for nuclear warfare and the anxiety of the post-Hiroshima age.^[21] He believed that, despite all of the technological progress of the 20th century, all people had learned was how to kill each other more efficiently.^[20] In Ran, the vehicle for apocalyptic destruction is the arquebus, an early firearm that was introduced to Japan in the 16th century. Arquebuses revolutionized samurai warfare, and the age of swords and single-combat warriors fell rapidly by the wayside. Now, samurai warfare would be characterized by massive faceless armies engaging each other at a distance. Kurosawa had already dealt with this theme in his previous film Kagemusha, in which the Takeda cavalry is destroyed by the arquebuses of the Oda and Tokugawa clans.

In Ran, the battle of Hachiman Field is a perfect illustration of this new kind of warfare. Saburo's arquebusiers annihilate Jiro's cavalry and drive off his infantry by engaging them from the woods, where the cavalry are unable to venture. Similarly, Saburo's assassination by a sniper also shows how individual heroes can be easily disposed of on a modern battlefield. Kurosawa also illustrates this new warfare with his camera. Instead of focusing on the warring armies, he frequently sets the focal plane beyond the action, so that in the film they appear as abstract entities.^[22]

Reception[link]

Though Ran opened to generally positive reviews at its premiere on June 1, 1985 in Japan, it was only modestly successful financially, earning only ¥2,510,000,000 ($12 million), just enough to break even.^[23] Its U.S. release six months later earned another $2–3 million, and a re-release in 2000 accumulated $337,112.^[24]

Ran had similar indifferent luck in the awards categories: it was completed too late to be entered at Cannes and had its premiere at Japan's first Tokyo International Film Festival.^[25] Kurosawa skipped the film's premiere, angering many in the Japanese film industry. As a result Ran was not submitted as Japan's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the Oscars. Serge Silberman then tried to get it nominated as a French co-production but failed. However, American director Sidney Lumet helped organize a successful campaign to have Kurosawa nominated as Best Director.^[11]

Roger Ebert awarded the film four out of four stars, writing, "'Ran' is a great, glorious achievement. Kurosawa often must have associated himself with the old lord as he tried to put this film together, but in the end he has triumphed, and the image I have of him, at 75, is of three arrows bundled together." In 2000, he added it to his list of great movies.

Accolades[link]

Ran was also nominated for Academy Awards for art direction, cinematography, and costume design (which it won). It was also unsuccessfully nominated for a Golden Globe for "Best Foreign Film". In Japan, Ran was conspicuously not nominated for "Best Picture" at the Awards of the Japanese Academy. However, it won two prizes, for best art direction and best music score, and received four other nominations, for best cinematography, best lighting, best sound and best supporting actor (Hitoshi Ueki, who played Saburo's patron, Lord Fujimaki). Ran also won two awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, for best foreign-language film and best make-up artist, and was nominated for best cinematography, best costume design, best production design, and best screenplay—adapted. Despite its limited success and reception at the time of its release, Ran has since been re-examined and its accolades have improved greatly, to the point that it is now regarded as one of Kurosawa's masterpieces.^[7]

See also[link]

• List of historical drama films of Asia

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Galbraith, Stuart, IV (2002). The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Faber and Faber, Inc. ISBN 0-571-19982-8. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ran (film)

• Ran at the Internet Movie Database
• Ran at AllRovi
• Ran (Japanese) at the Japanese Movie Database
• Ran Script — Dialogue Transcript: A transcript of film from Drew's Script-O-Rama.
• Ran at Rotten Tomatoes