Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
For Kurosawa, more than for Shakespeare, the monarch's real erosion of authority has its roots in the way he acquired power in the first place: through systematic pillage and slaughter.
Shakespeare showed us sound and fury signifying nothing; Kurosawa delivers a spectacular depiction of doomsday karma. Hidetora long ago routed the evil Lady Kaede's clan. That's why she yearns to see the old master stripped of any kingliness. She doesn't stop playing lusty power games when Hidetora's oldest son, her husband, is killed, and Hidetora deteriorates into madness. She promptly seduces the second son, Jiro. He may already be wed to the saintly Lady Sue -- the daughter of another of Hidetora's conquered enemies -- but that doesn't stop Lady Kaede. As the power of each man in the tragedy recedes, Lady Kaede's keeps growing. She's a No drama version of an energy vampire.
Mieko Harada brings to this tigress part a jet-black passion that's as keen and swift as it is seductive. She shivers with ecstasy when she nicks Jiro with a knife. By the time we see Hidetora roaming over wind-ravaged hills and pitiless barren plains, Lady Kaede has become a Fury. She merits her stunning, geyserlike send-off; it's as gasp-provoking as anything Kurosawa came up with in the 23 years between "Sanjuro" and "Ran."
Everyone admires the climactic glories of this movie. The rap against "Ran" has always been that its first hour is too formal and slow moving. I think the opening frames are charged with invisible vectors emanating from Hidetora's potency. No other film has made an audience so viscerally conscious of all a king's horses and all a king's men waiting at their ruler's beck and call. That's one reason the ensuing chaos pulls you in like a vortex.
When the two oldest sons' armies converge on Hidetora and his retinue in a churning sequence of phantasmagoric carnage, it forces him to confront the victims' side of war. There are moments of violence that are appalling and crazy and inevitable all at the same time, like Hidetora's favorite courtesans falling on each other with daggers in a double suicide. As arrows shower down on every side of him, the sight is almost like a circus bow-and-arrow act turned into harrowing torture. Hidetora sees his own brutal legacy. He lapses into shock. As the battle encircles him, time slows to a bloodcurdling eternity.
"Ran" has a trickle-down theory of anarchy, all right, but it trickles down, in gore, all the way from heaven. The gods have left men -- and, as Lady Kaede shows, women -- at the mercy of their human drives for dominance and retribution.
I spoke with Kurosawa in 1986, when "Ran" was in its first run. He was 76 at the time and still a Jovian figure, towering over his entourage, smoking cigarettes and wearing his trademark sunglasses. (He died in 1998.) By the calendar he might have been a lion in winter, but in his geniality and vigor he seemed positively springlike. I asked him why he blanked out the sound in the first, traumatic battle except for the mournful music. "What I was trying to get at in 'Ran,'" he said, "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. The music comes up to represent the feelings of the gods."
Kurosawa's canvas covers a complete spectrum of thought and emotion and yin and yang, from the Buddhist balance of Lady Sue and the hale masculine confidence of Hidetaro's youngest son to the overflowing emotion of the Fool (played by a famous female impersonator called "Peter"), who spills his home truths in a taunting and coquettish way -- as if he were an intermediary between male and female worlds. Without this broad a canvas, the film could not bring off its sense of a universal turbulence.
In the battle scenes, the armies are color-coded: yellow, red, blue, black and white. The effect of clarity within chaos is both aesthetically transporting and psychologically leveling. As the armies charge, regroup and retreat, Kurosawa's lightning palette lets you trace the eddying coils of humanity. Never have such simple symbolic acts as foot soldiers shedding their insignia and leaving flags strewn across a field attained such deadly impact.
Yet the movie ends with simple images of Lady Sue's brother, a blind flutist, and, lying in a moat, a portrait of the Buddha. "In the past," Kurosawa told me, "the contrast between different characters' viewpoints -- that was what I was best able to grasp. Now it's finally become more natural for me to take a more objective viewpoint. 'Ran' is maybe the first time that I feel confident that I have achieved that overview."
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