Film Review: Ran (1985), directed by Akira Kurosawa
From time to time, we intend to post reflections and reviews of films we watch together. When we do this, we’ll each offer a take on the film we’re reviewing. We hope that these reviews will introduce you to some films you may have never seen, but which you might appreciate viewing, or to a fresh take on a film you’ve already seen. If you find what we have to say interesting, please share our reviews with your friends.
For this first joint film review, we’re discussing Akira Kurosawa’s late film Ran (in English, Chaos), which is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set around the 16th century or so in Japan in the Sengoku period, during which there were nearly continual civil wars among smaller lords. Shakespeare’s Lear is based on the legendary King Leir of the Britons who would have lived in 8th century BC who divided his kingdom among his daughters after making a test of his love for them.
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Mark’s Take:
Late in Ran, when nearly everyone has died (that’s not a spoiler, because this is an adaptation of King Lear (only more violent), so you already know how it’s going to end), the fool Kyoami (Shinnosuke Ikehata) cries out:
Are there no gods... no Buddha? If you exist, hear me. You are mischievous and cruel! Are you so bored up there you must crush us like ants? Is it such fun to see men weep?
Tango (Masayuki Yui), the loyal servant to the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) who represents Lear, and the film’s stand-in for Kent in Shakespeare’s play, responds:
Enough! Do not blaspheme! It is the gods who weep. They see us killing each other over and over since time began. They can't save us from ourselves.
In an earlier post, I discussed C.S. Lewis’ medieval Christian vision of the human person positioned between the beasts and the gods. What Kurosawa gives us in Ran is, in some ways, a kind of negative or inverse image of the same relationship. He shows persons situated between living nature and the divine, but not ultimately in harmony with either of them. But this is not because nature or the gods are cruel or domineering. Rather, we are alienated from nature and the gods by our own violence and lusts. The gods weep for us, nature appeals to us with her beauty—but we continually resist.
In the opening scene of Ran, Hidetora, along with his sons and other warlords, is hunting boars. The hunt takes place in bright sunshine, on steep hills covered with waving, almost impossibly lush grass. After this initial assault on nature, the men sequester themselves for a meal behind cloth walls—open to the sky, but cut off from the beauty of nature around them. After this meal, Hidetora makes his fateful decision to split his kingdom between his two oldest sons who flatter him, and to banish his third son (the character based on Cordelia) who is loyal to him but refuses to flatter him. This sets in motion the events that will lead to his own exile and madness, and to an insanely destructive war among the brothers.
Despite deliberately cutting themselves off from nature and the divine, nature and the gods and buddhas are always there in the film, subtly insisting on being seen. At numerous points throughout the film, there are brief cuts to shots of great masses of cloud or waving grass. Kurosawa uses this technique of cutting to fixed camera angle nature shots quite well. The undisputed master of this technique is Kurosawa’s compatriot Yasujiro Ozu (for example, in his masterpiece Late Spring) but it is also used well (though perhaps more melodramatically, and often with a moving camera) by Terrence Malick. Ozu’s use of this technique of cutting, during a scene, to a shot of pine tree, a dripping water pipe outside a temple, a mountain, has been compared to the Japanese art of ikebana, the art of flower cutting and flower arranging. Ikebana means ‘making flowers alive’—which we might take to be an ironic name for an art that literally involves cutting flowers when they are still alive, thus killing them.
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But, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains, the act of cutting the flowers
deals the flower a mortal blow. It makes it die on its own. This death, however, differs from withering, which would be a kind of slowly passing away [Ab-leben], or natural death, for the flower. One hands the flower its death before it has lived its life to the end. In the art of Ikebana, a flower must be removed before it withers, before its natural death, before the living and striving have ceased. The cut flower, without desire, lingers there and then. It fully inhabits the immediate present, without a care for the before or after. All of it becomes time without resisting time. Where it moves along with time, is friends with it, time does not pass. […] Ikebana therefore differs from an art of survival that ‘seeks eternity by denying temporality’ or by working to remove it. The art of Ikebana is not based on such work of mourning. ‘Ikebana’ literally means ‘making flowers alive’. It is a unique kind of ‘making alive’. You make the flower alive, give it a deeper vitality, by handing it its death. Ikebana makes impermanence itself shine, without any semblance of infinity. Beautiful, here, is the soothed, calm finitude that rests in itself, a finitude that is illuminated without looking beyond itself. Beautiful is being without appetitus. (The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, pages 47-48)
Just so, the sudden cuts to shots of clouds and grass in Ran (or, even better, Ozu’s cuts in his films) make those aspects of nature live. Those moments of moving cloud or waving grass, in all the uniqueness of their flowing movements, the way that the grass or the cloud looks at that moment and no other, in all of its impermanence, is made to shine.
In his book on philosophy of film, Gilles Deleuze observes that one of the distinctive characteristics of film is the new viewpoint it gives us upon reality. Shots in a film do not follow the logic of seeing with the bodily eye. Unlike the human eye, which is always adjusting and moving to take up new viewpoints on things, the camera’s “eye”, the “cine-eye,” can take a completely immobile viewpoint on things, when the camera is shooting from a fixed location. Also unlike human vision, radically discontinuous viewpoints on things can succeed one another, especially during a montage. A shot from one perspective (or of one place or time) can be immediately followed by a shot from another perspective (or another place or time) without moving through the intervening places between the two perspectives, as one would have to do if one were seeing with the bodily eye. Film can thereby show new connections among things—connections which in fact are there in reality—but which cannot be seen from a purely human point of view. What Kurosawa (and Ozu, and Malick, and others) do is use this feature of cinematic seeing to bring about a contemplative state. Film can enable us to see the beauty of transitory nature, the presence of a sort of divinity or buddhahood, in that transitoriness, which we can easily overlook in normal perception, perception not trained and extended by the medium of art.
In Ran, the extraordinary peace of resting in the beauty of transitory nature is available to all of the characters. They live in a place of deep, and deeply varied, beauty. (Somehow, within the relatively small domain over which they are fighting, there are a great range of landscapes—mountains, forests, deserts, grasslands, wastelands—all very close to one another.) But they don’t see it. They are driven by appetite, by longing for power, and it brings only destruction—albeit a destruction that strangely, under Kurosawa’s camera’s eye, has its own beauty, as if this violent surging of fire and blood also were a mere natural movement, like the building of clouds or the play of wind over the grass. The repeated, almost identical shots of the soldiers of one army firing from the cover of the forest and massacring the soldiers of another army have an almost hypnotic beauty.
The character who we might think of as most in touch with nature, at least her own nature, the character is most like a natural force is Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), but she uses her natural forcefulness destructively, in an insane pursuit of revenge, which leads her to seduction, manipulation, and murder. Hidetora is increasingly immersed in nature, thrown, like Lear, upon the wild elements, but this leads to madness, depicted in the character’s rapid physical transformation into a sort of wild man (which looks like the physical transformation of King Theoden in The Two Towers in reverse.) The characters who trust in the gods or the buddhas are utterly ineffective, though they seem to know first-hand how the gods weep over us and the evils we wreak upon one another. At least, this is so until the very end. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it depicts a peculiar and powerful mixture of despair and hope, which is perhaps a first step in a return to our proper, positive place between nature and the gods.
Susanna’s Take:
My thoughts on Ran can be divided into two sections—reflections on the influence of a parent’s life and actions on their children and on women as the stronger of the sexes in a certain sense.
Raising of Children
There is a line in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice about the five Bennet daughters being left to their natural strengths and weaknesses in their self-directed educations. You see that come out throughout the novel. And while they were perhaps not intentionally formed in virtue, each daughter takes on characteristics of one or both of their parents to some extent. In the Bennet family, the youngest daughter Lydia is a mirror image of her mother in her foolishness, and Elizabeth is in a lot of ways like her clever father, an observer of the ridiculousness of human character. The point is that children will imitate the manners and habits of their parents even into adulthood for good or for evil.
This seems to also be the case for King Lear—his two oldest daughters learned of greed and power grabbing from him. Lear knew that after his death there would be a struggle for power, and he was trying to prevent it. However, like his daughters, he also appreciated a comfortable life, craving a secure retirement. Cordelia, the youngest, must have somehow attained all of his true virtues, ones that a king who rules well is required to have, including a devotion to and love of those nearest to him and a clear sense of justice.
These character traits are similar in Hidetora and his sons—the oldest two, Taro and Jiro, having learned to be warlike and power-hungry from their father who ruthlessly controlled his valley, waging war on all other lords and powerful families around him. He even marries his two oldest sons to the last living member of each of the families he destroyed—more on this later. This seems to be all the two oldest sons have received from him, the greed of power, desire for the stability of a throne, and a willingness and coldness to do what it takes to have the throne. But what else could Hidetora have expected from his sons? He only had the authority of a father over them when they feared his punishments and retaliation. As soon as he let go of his power, they had nothing to fear from him and no love for him. And resentments could surface against him followed by a boldness in the face of his aged weakness.
Saburo (the third son) alone seems to have inherited a sense of justice, a true devotion to his elders, and even love—a love that must have been present in his father despite his ruthlessness. Or maybe he learned it from a loyal servant such as Tango who only sees his sense of duty to Hidetora. There is a natural fidelity we owe to our rulers and parents that Saburo had within him and would not foster or demonstrate beyond its just limits even in the face of banishment. He saw his brothers lying through their teeth about their love for their father and could not do so himself. Perhaps he saw the problems of the total warfare conducted by his father but also knew the inevitability of the bloodbath that would follow between his brothers after his father stepped down or died.
My takeaway here is the importance of personal growth in virtue and the impact it has on our own children. In her Essays on Woman, St. Edith Stein talks about the importance of the lived example of parents and teachers on the child for them to grow into a virtuous and devout person—though, of course, this idea is not just in Stein. How we choose to live and act is highly influential on who our children grow up to be. Hidetora should not have been surprised at how his two oldest sons treated him based on how he lived.
The Strength of Women
Every Kurosawa film I have seen has shown the tension of dynamics between men and women. One aspect of it that he brings out is also emphasized by Gertrude von le Fort in her The Eternal Woman: The Timeless Meaning of the Feminine, and that is that woman is the stronger of the sexes. Von le Fort clearly does not mean that woman is stronger physically, but rather she is referring to inner strength of will and outer influence over others. Von le Fort points to women in history who have manipulated power behind the scenes either through strength of will or seductions. A glance, a word, a smile, a dress—women have used all of these things and more throughout human history to get what they want. We could even just bring to mind examples from scripture: Eve’s offering of the fruit to Adam, Esther’s courage to face her husband the king to save her people, Deliah’s influence over Samson to bring about his demise. Von le Fort argues that this is why we are commanded to submit our will to our husbands’ will. It is the state of the creature to give our fiat to our Creator—and it is a woman who shows us how this is done, the Mother of God herself. When we give up what is our biggest strength, and submit it to God’s will, we find salvation. Yet, when we choose to assert our own will over what is right and good, chaos ensues.
In Ran we see this played out in the wives of Taro and Jiro. Jiro is married to Lady Sue, a devout Buddhist who in the aftermath of the destruction of her family and the blinding of her brother, spends her days in mediation outside of the political world. She has the inner strength to submit her will to the acceptance of what has happened and seeks to live in inner peace.
Taro’s wife Lady Kaede on the other hand uses her feminine strength for a different end: revenge against her father-in-law who is responsible for the slaughter of her whole family and took over her family castle. She does everything in her power to manipulate and grab power. It is Kaede that plants the idea in her husband to send her father-in-law Hidetora away. When Taro dies, she then moves on to Jiro without even mourning her husband. She has felt helpless her whole life and is not going to give up the chance she sees before her to grab power. It is Kaede that ultimately causes the destruction of many—and she is satisfied in declaring her revenge.
In Ran and in King Lear we see the tension between the misused will of a woman verses the proper submission of a woman’s will to the good and beautiful even at the cost of her own life.
And perhaps this is a lesson for me as a woman to bear in mind—that I have the power and strength to impact the lives of others. They say that if the mom is happy, the whole family is happy. But how a mother comes to that happiness is what determines a family dynamic and perhaps even the virtue and vices in the children. If I choose to the happiness of peace between my husband and myself through submitting to his love and consenting to his good choices for the family, we are all happy and on the path to holiness. If I manipulate matters so that I always get my own selfish will, then we are miserable and unsatisfied.
The strength of woman is meant to be given up for the sake of others. The strength of man is meant to be laid down like Christ laid down His life for the Church. When we both lay down and submit our strengths in the way God intended, we become more powerful in His grace than we could ever be on our own. Or, we could end up like those at the end of Ran, with countless people pointlessly dead, with nothing to hope for or in.