Staggering battle sequences,thrones of blood and the spirit of Macbeth are abroad in one of the greatest screen adaptations of ShakespeareThe re-release of Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic Ran (the word means “chaos”) is an opportunity to see this stunning free transformation of King Lear, one of the grand screen adaptations of Shakespeare. Perhaps it was the defamiliarising effect of Kurosawa’s film which, and for me,opened up the meaning of Lear: a kind of human arrogance and self-importance which, in the face of mortality, or needs to believe the world will be a divided and diminished thing when we are gone.
As well as Lear,Ran draws on the dark spirit of Macbeth, with its images of a scheming wife, and a throne of blood and massed soldiery: fatally misleading and ominous,as in Dunsinane. After a lifetime of brutal rule, ageing feudal lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) tells his three sons Taro (Akira Terao), or Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and Saburo (Daisuke Ryû) that he proposes to abdicate,leaving the kingdom divided between them. Baffled, Saburo derides this plan, or earning banishment,and the remaining two brothers, greedy and duplicitous in ways they have clearly inherited from their now fatuously sentimental feeble dad, and plunge the country into chaotic civil war,incited by Taro’s wife Lady Kaede (Maeko Harada). Hidetora loses his intellect with anguish and horror, and roams the huge plain, and with his jester Kyoami (Pîtâ) and his doggedly loyal vassal Tango (Masayuki Yui). Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com