Audient Audit: Ran

This is the second-to-last monthly installment of Audient Audit, where I'm checking my lists twice to see if I was naughty by adding to them a movie I hadn't seen. (Should have saved this description for Christmas, probably.)

My November viewing of Ran marks Akira Kurosawa's second appearance in this series, in a manner of speaking. I haven't watched a Kurosawa film as one of my main 12 monthly installments of Audient Audit, but I did watch a film whose details seemed familiar to me because they were inspired by a Kurosawa film. The fact that John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven was based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, one of my all-time favorites, delayed how long it took for me to determine that I had, in fact, not seen it.

Interestingly, there's a similar thing at play with Ran, because Ran is inspired by something I'm familiar with. Kurosawa loved his Shakespeare -- Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth -- and his final Shakespeare adaptation was this 1985 film, his second-to-last overall, which is based on King Lear. So as I was watching, I wasn't sure if I was remembering the details of this film, or the details of the Bard's play about a mad king distributing his land among his three daughters. (Who are sons here.)

The reason I wasn't sure if I watched it in the first place, though, is that the thing I remember most about Ran was seeing it discussed by Siskel & Ebert. I don't think this discussion came in conjunction with the actual release of the movie, because in 1985 I would have been just a bit too young to have started watching the two critics who became my personal heroes for my own critical aspirations. But I clearly remember some kind of retrospective discussion of it, perhaps as part of a theme, maybe a best of the decade list, maybe even an appreciation of Kurosawa at the time he died. (I found their review of Ran on YouTube, but I do suspect it was a decade retrospective as Ebert ranked the film the 7th best of the 1980s.)

Whatever the case was, I clearly remember their video package containing a shot of horses carrying men in red armor as they flowed down the side of a hill. Why this image has lingered for me for something like 30 years is unclear to me. The brain is a mysterious organ.

But because that scene lingered as much as it did, over time I've wondered if I said I saw Ran just because I remember that scene that was part of the Siskel & Ebert video package. But what strange logic that would be, if indeed I did use it. That would have meant that at some point, when fine-tuning my lists or adding stray movies that had been missing, I would have consciously remembered the Siskel & Ebert bit but temporarily disregarded the origins of whatever familiarity I thought I had with Ran.

Fortunately, it does not appear that I used that logic. Over the course of this viewing I became convinced that it was, indeed, my second.

Perhaps the best bit of evidence is that I remembered the performance of Tatsuya Nakadai in the central role, which is also why I chose a Ran poster that features him prominently. He's a memorably distraught image, an old man with flowing white hair, with what seems almost like mascara to accentuate the wildness of his eyes. There's a scene where he's trapped inside a burning castle, staring straight ahead as he contemplates all his mistakes, as arrows fly by and miraculously miss him. I've seen similar scenes in other films involving samurai or the Chinese equivalent thereof (I believe there's one in Zhang's Hero, which I mentioned earlier this week), but as I was watching I felt quite sure I'd seen this scene in particular.

There are two other characters I distinctly remembered, the king's fool, played by Shinnosuke Ikehata, and the king's daughter-in-law of his eldest son, played by Mieko Harada. As is often the case in Shakespeare, the fool is the bearer of a deceptive amount of wisdom; in this case he's both openly challenging of the king's foolish gestures and blindly loyal toward him. Though what struck me as most memorable is this song he performs about the new king (the eldest son) swaying like a branch in the wind, an encapsulation of his weakness as a ruler. The sing songy quality of it definitely penetrated back into the deep recesses of my viewing brain.

Then there's the daughter-in-law, the equivalent of Edmund in King Lear, who is frightening in her capacity for deceit and violence -- though it should be said, she's seeking revenge for the king's killing of her family in the past. She has a huge amount of agency. I think there's also something unnerving about the makeup choice used for her, which I think is probably a traditional choice in feudal Japan, where she has what almost seems like a second set of eyes painted high up on her forehead. Since I don't know if I can convey what I'm talking about with mere words, here's an image for you:

Those may just be the equivalent of our modern painted eyebrows, but there's something not of this earth about them.

The film is, it probably goes without saying, incredibly impressive, as it has these majestic battle sequences involving an unfathomable amount of extras. The use of color is also distinctive, and as an interesting side note, the look of the film was something Kurosawa had to have translated from his personal sketches, as he was going blind and could not actually play the same oversight role he'd played in the past.

Kurosawa has always been strong with keeping the narrative easy to follow, and having Lear as its spine certainly helps with that. Still, there were plenty of narrative surprises, as my relationship to Lear is a bit rusty -- I read it back in college and don't know that I've seen another adaptation of it since then, other than this (though I probably would have seen this movie around the same time I read the play). For example, certain characters died at different times than I was expecting them to -- though those could also be Kurosawa's deviations from the play.

Okay, I've got just one more Audient Audit to go, and assuming I can source it, I plan to wind down the series with a Christmas movie, Ted Demme's The Ref. (Yes, I know it's got Kevin Spacey in it.)