Ran

From the opening shot—four warriors in a high mountain meadow facing four directions, waiting for something (we learn in the next shot that they are hunting a wild boar)—Ran announces itself as a meditation on man’s place in an indifferent or possibly malevolent universe. It also announces in sometimes overbearing tones its status as a masterpiece. Stripped of sentimentality and practically devoid of close-ups, Ran seems to side with the universe against humanity, gazing with chilly aesthetic and literal distance as Lord Hidetora (Nakadai) turns his kingdom over to his children, only to find he’s misjudged them.

Kurosawa works on an epic scale, with thousands of soldiers and hundreds of horses to give the story a proper sense of scale and catastrophe (Kurosawa said that one subject of this feudal drama is the threat of nuclear war and the consequent devastation). But what’s the point of doing Shakespeare without Shakespeare’s language?

The answer comes in Kurosawa’s visual sense. Kurosawa’s work is often referred to as painterly (he trained as a painter), but it might be more accurate to say that Kurosawa had a great eye for cinematic composition, since his finest images often involve the careful orchestration of movement. Just watch the famous sequence in which Hidetora descends a staircase from a burning castle and walks through a field of soldiers like a mad Moses parting the Red Sea.

Kurosawa’s message is as grim as Shakespeare’s in King Lear; justice has been replaced by merciless cycles of revenge, and happy endings are a delusion, since the only true ending is death. Kurosawa ends the film with another justly famous image: the blind man on the edge of a cliff. It’s unsubtle as imagery goes, but haunting nonetheless.

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