Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is a harrowing war film that keeps the family quarrels clear amid the armies. A few overextended conversations do little to diminish its fierce performances or the frightening precision of its battles.
Ran is a terrible family quarrel made large enough to fill a battlefield, and we would recommend it even to those who usually avoid war films. Akira Kurosawa’s reworking of King Lear asks what happens when a powerful man’s failures become everybody else’s problem. The scale matters because private malice can command armies here. It is a severe film, but its anger is easy to understand. The screenplay is by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni and Masato Ide.
The cinematographers, Shoji Ueda, Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saitō, give the armies enough space for us to follow their movement. The colour coding gives us a practical way of distinguishing the rival forces without constant explanation. That precision lets us register how many people are caught inside a quarrel among a handful of powerful figures. Kurosawa keeps returning to the armies and their banners in sweeping views.
Emi Wada’s costumes help keep the figures distinct within those wide compositions. Production designers Shinobu Muraki and Yoshirō Muraki give the chamber scenes a severity that suits their occupants. These rooms offer little suggestion of domestic comfort, and the formal confrontations feel at home in them. The shift indoors puts the actors and their confrontations at the centre of our attention, without making the struggle over power seem any smaller.
Kurosawa’s editing preserves that sense of organised movement through the battles, giving us time to understand the forces involved rather than simply count the cuts. Tōru Takemitsu’s mournful score makes the fighting harder to enjoy as a display of skill. We were horrified by the battles. The coloured formations stay readable through the brutality, so there is little refuge in pretending we cannot follow what is happening.
Tatsuya Nakadai gives Lord Hidetora Ichimonji enough frailty to make him recognisably human without asking us to excuse him. His Noh-influenced make-up can make the face appear almost fixed, which gives small changes of expression unusual force. The acting is openly theatrical, and it suits a man accustomed to being watched. Mieko Harada’s Lady Kaede belongs in the same heightened style, with a ferocity that holds our attention through the private confrontations.
The screenplay sometimes labours a point the staging has already made, and the formal exchanges can feel overextended. This is also where the film’s distance becomes a limitation: a less emphatic conversation might bring us closer to the people involved. Nakadai’s vulnerability usually supplies the human detail these passages need, but a few could have been shorter. The film runs 160 minutes.
Many war films encourage us to admire whoever gets the armies moving. Ran makes that authority look dangerous even when the movement is magnificent. Its spectacle keeps sending us back to the damage done by people who expect obedience, and the private scenes make clear how little judgement they can possess. Give it an uninterrupted evening, preferably on a screen large enough to keep the people visible within the formations.
