Ran is awesome

I rented a DVD of Kurosawa’s Ran to watch on a flight from Boston to LA, and I have become once again restored in my flagging faith that the art of cinema can on occasion rise comfortably above the mediocre. Ran won the Oscar for best costume design, and in my mind it is the all time best in that category, as well as in art direction & set decoration (nominated but didn’t win), and possibly in cinematography as well (also nominated). I’m not one who is normally impressed with great costumes and sets, but this film is one of very few that could compete with the aerial view of the Rocky Mountains from my window seat. I was mesmerized from the very first scene. (Amy Taubin of the Village Voice described the film as “stunning”, and this is one of those occasions when I remember that the word is derived from an actual verb.)

Ran is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in 16th century Japan. Kurosawa cuts and pastes a lot of elements from King Lear: for example, there is a character who has had his eyes gouged out, like Gloucester in Lear, but in Ran, the gouging happened long before the movie began, and his relationship to the lead character is quite different; and there is a non-fatal cliff jump, as in Lear (though in most productions the cliff is not even a real one), but in Ran, the blind character is not the one who jumps. Anyhow, the plot is secondary. It’s mostly about visuals. It reminded me of (and undoubtedly influenced) the recent Chinese film Hero, but I didn’t miss the supernatural martial arts tricks, and the presence of some emotional substance within the “visually spectacular Asian war film” genre is a distinct plus.

So now we have Ran, The Ox-Bow Incident, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans on my list of films that justify all the time spent watching mediocre films. I was beginning to wonder if the invention of color photography had contributed anything to the art of cinema. Now I see that it has – if you know where to look.