Movie review • Ran : On the edge of the precipice by Akira Kurosawa

Free adaptation but which keeps intact the articulation of the story and the themes of corruption by power, revenge, madness.

Ran is presented as a distant adaptation of King Lear by William Shakespeare. However, by the time he started writing the film in 1976, just after completing the shooting of Dersou Ouzala in the USSR, Kurosawa only had in mind a story inspired by warlord Motonari Mori, who in the 16th century had bequeathed his territory to his three sons, urging them to work together for the benefit of the clan. The filmmaker's ambition is to develop the idea that the three successors would betray their father's will and end up killing each other. As the script begins to strongly resemble the plot of King Lear, the play is invited into the script. But the film departs significantly from Shakespearean work by its stake linked to the history of Japan and its traditions. Where old Lear, animated by an internal conflict which leads him to lose the sense of the State by soliciting the love of his three daughters against the partition of his kingdom, precipitates society into chaos, Hidetora Ichimonji is not attached to no individualistic feeling and his objective is only to be able to transmit his feudal domain to his descendants who will have to remain unified. In the first case, the chaos arises above all from a personal trauma (amplified by age) specific to the neurotic characters of Shakespeare carried away by their self-destructive passions; in the second case, it is much more of an institutional chaos (ran means chaos) which stems from the impossibility according to Kurosawa for this system of being able to resist the destructive inclinations peculiar to the human being and whose effects are repeat endlessly.

It is therefore a spiral of destruction that we will witness, with the methodical annihilation of the three seigneurial estates inherited by the three sons, while the father gradually sinks into madness. The relationship between power and madness (an obsession also shared by Shakespeare) is also an essential theme in Ran. But for the humanist Kurosawa, Hidetora's madness is twofold: it is not only the sign expressed by the institutional will to found its domination by captation and blood, and to destroy all forms of otherness (which the Patriarch Ichimonji is incapable of understanding at the beginning, sure of its principles and its traditions), it also represents the emergence of an awareness in front of this criminal and criminogenic mode of operation. Hidetora goes mad when she sees not only her failure to pass on her kingdom to her children but also and above all that her system of values ​​based on the conquest of power through barbarism is doomed to ruin and the spread of evil by evil. Hence the few flashes of lucidity of the old lord, close to a certain form of redemption, considering the horrible scope of his past misdeeds when he is put in the presence of his former victims: Sue, the wife of his son Jiro, whose family he massacred and who has since taken refuge in Buddhism to escape any hateful temptation; and the young blind Tsurumuru, Sue's brother, whose eyes he had gouged out, who lives in a cabin, peacefully plays the flute and keeps near him an image of a Buddha in divine light.

A dual logic also presides over the characterization of Hidetora's two daughters-in-law. While Jiro's wife takes refuge in spirituality to empty herself of any negative feelings, we will discover that the beautiful Kaede, Taro's wife, is only concerned with leading the Ichimonji clan to its ruin to satisfy its revenge ( she is also a prey of war, her family having also been massacred). She acts both as a seducer and a predator; and when Jiro and his faithful fencing master Kurogane listen to her confess to having orchestrated the division between the lords, they throw themselves violently on her to behead her in a gesture of rage that testifies as much to their anger as to their incomprehension and of the pain of having been so duped. The whole film is traversed by this feeling of inevitability which the characters are unable to realize - with the exception of the youngest Saburo who at the very beginning, during the handover of power, announces to his family that the arrangement decided by his father will bring destruction to his clan contrary to the hopes of unity (it is the parable of the three arrows together supposedly unbreakable that he nevertheless manages to break to the great astonishment of Hidetora). This inexorability is reflected directly in the formal choices made by Akira Kurosawa, who with Ran achieves a form of obviousness, control and stylistic purity that makes it a film that is the sum of his entire work.

The intrinsic strength of a film like Ran comes from its plastic approach which testifies to an unparalleled assurance on the part of the Japanese master. While the story is made only of outbursts of violence and psychological confrontations, the directing exudes a kind of serenity and balance, it displays a distance that makes it possible to observe this small world moving before its annihilation. By inscribing the destinies of his characters in grandiose landscapes, Kurosawa reminds them of their very relative place in the ordering of the universe. The regular shots of the clouds, the sun and the elements throughout the film are as much warning signs of bad omen as a vain call for a transcendence which the warlords are obviously incapable of, while busy tearing each other apart. The absence of the divine intervention is also a notion which ends up emerging. First verbally when leaning over the corpse of his master, Hidetora's jester, Kyoami, calls out Buddha, accusing him of cruelty to humans and Tango, Saburo's lieutenant, replies that only men are responsible for their misfortune. Then during the last eloquent shot of the film: the blind Tsurumuru near the ruins of the castle approaches a precipice and drops his scroll depicting his protective Buddha. The last image shows the young man in a wide shot, motionless, leaning on his stick before a fade to black. The conclusion is terrible: man is abandoned by the divine, if it ever existed, and he is even blind to this idea to the point of wandering endlessly without answers to his questions.

An incredible scene by its originality and its mastery testifies to the dramatic distance conveyed by the staging, it is that of the assault carried out jointly by the armies of Taro and Jiro on the third castle (where Hidetora is refugee with his retinue). This is an entirely silent sequence, with the notable exception of the disturbing strident funeral music composed by Takemitsu. Kurosawa organizes a paralyzing bloody ballet dominated by a majority of fixed and more or less close shots in which warriors giving or receiving death are agitated, where volleys of arrows appear which streak the screen in deafening silence. There is something like a paradox in the general dynamic, which consists in looking at an inert scenic space shaken by furtive movements coming from the four directions of the frame which fail to destabilize the internal balance of each shot. We seem to be contemplating a waking nightmare, that of Hidetora who remained alone at the top of the dungeon after having seen his men and women fall one after the other, assailed by arrows which did not reach him since he had already become a simple ghost attending his forfeiture. And the action of concluding with a scene as majestic by its solemnity as sinister by its gravity, that of the descent of the grand staircase by the old man in front of a burning castle, while he evolves like a specter grimacing in front of the armies which let him exit through the front door and then finally disappear at the bottom of a frame at great depth of field. The spectator, from his position knowingly distant, is then seized with a fear mixed with sadness by the potential of destruction to which the human being testifies.

Finally, Akira Kurosawa, who has only used color since Dodeskaden (1970), takes a step forward with Ran in his experiments by resorting to a true pictorial discourse, giving his colorimetric research a role as dramatic as it is symbolic. The filmmaker became a painter and his paintings have served as a storyboard since Kagemusha.In Ran, the color palette is striking, contributing to the formation of real living pictures, whether through natural landscapes or thanks to the costumes created with the greatest care. In a kind of impressionism where uniforms and kimonos in primary colors are opposed to the sumptuous greens or the volcanic gray-black of the landscapes of Mount Fuji, a dialectic is set up as the events unfold. The evolution of the outfits worn by the three sons and their armies - yellow for Taro, red for Jiro and blue for Saburo - follow the changes of alliance, oppositions and breaks in the narrative.The general tone of the image changes from the lush blue / green to the black of the volcanic mountainous landscapes and the black of the Ayabe clan who comes to recover the remains of the destroyed Ichimonji clan. The emblem of the Ichimonji clan - the yellow sun and crescent moon on a black background - carries an internal opposition which finds its translation in reality when the sons go to kill each other; at the end the yellow of the fire and the black of the ashes will validate the destruction of this emblem and therefore of the clan.

In this couple of colors obviously creeps in the red, that of the passion which carries Jiro and that omnipresent of the blood of course, this blood of Kaede which draws a calligraphy after its projection on the wall at the time of the decapitation of the young woman. When pictorial splendor meets and amplifies the ineluctable tragedy of the human condition, when the nobility of the traditional gesture paradoxically transmits all the horror of self-destructive passions, it is Akira Kurosawa's cinematographic art to know how to solve this equation of opposites.

Kurosawa, who takes a distanced and at the same time desperate gaze on feudal and indirectly contemporary Japan - the fear of self-annihilation in the filmmaker is often expressed in the interstices - delivers us with Ran a beautiful and funeral poem on the end of 'a world that is as much a warning about the future as an artistic outcome concerning the dramatic and formal issues of a work unlike any other.