Akira Kurosawa was among the most important post-World War II directors, the Japanese lion of art house cinema who influenced Hollywood with films such as Seven Samurai and Rashoman. Ran (1985), perhaps the greatest movie of his latter years, has been released along with bonus material on Blu-ray.
In Ran, Kurosawa brilliantly transposes King Lear to 16th century Japan, a time when feudal lords fought each other from castles with muskets as well as flaming arrows and samurai swords. With acute psychological insight, the director tells an archetypal story of family conflict triggered when the aged Great Lord abruptly decides to step aside in favor of his eldest son. What follows is a bloody dynastic feud fueled by pride and greed, vengeance and the eruption of long repressed hostility. Ran incorporates conventions from Japanese theater; the film’s rhythm is as ritualized as the society it depicts, but the stylization doesn’t obscure an unflinching depiction of the cruelty and violence of war.
Usurped by the sons he loved, the Great Lord remains sympathetic even as we learn how he built his domain on the bones of those he killed. The great battle scenes unfold in a Japan scarcely imaginable nowadays, a verdant, hilly country of empty space and silence broken only by the hum of unseen birds and the mostly angry enterprises of humanity.
