The powerful Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) is aging; everyone knows this, and his allies Lord Fujimaki (Hitoshi Ueki) and Lord Ayabe (Jun Tazake) are already looking to marry off their daughters to his youngest son. One day, after a nap, Hidetora has a vision and conceives a plan that he hopes will maintain the balance of power after his death; he abdicates in favour of his eldest son Taro (Akira Terao), giving him the First Castle of his realm, whilst bestowing on his second son Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and third son Saburo (Daisuke Ryu) the Second and Third castles and the lands under their command – the idea being that this division of power would guarantee that his three sons will work together to keep the Ichimonji lands strong.
The obedient, dutiful, and flattery-prone Taro and Jiro are happy to go along with this – but third son Saburo, who is honest to the point of rudeness, unconventional, and defiant, thinks the plan is an awful idea and Hidetora has taken leave of his senses, and declares as much. Tango (Masayuki Yui), one of the attendants witnessing this, points out that a Lord is better served by those who speak their minds and tell him things he doesn’t want to hear than those who refuse to say no to him.
Hidetora is infuriated, and as one of his last acts in charge banishes both Tango and Saburo. Not only does this immediately destabilise the balance of power between his sons that Hidetora had planned, but this fracas was witnessed by both Lord Ayabe and Lord Fujimaki, who both in their own way realise the trouble and opportunity that must come from this. Lord Ayabe rejects the idea of marrying his daughter to any of the Ichimonji sons, whilst Lord Fujimaki realises that by arranging a marriage between his daughter and Saburo he can get a son-in-law with a claim to Ichimonji lands – and one who has demonstrated just the sort of combination of honesty and loyalty that appeals to him.
Meanwhile, at the First Castle, Taro’s men and Hidetora’s attendants come to blows after Taro’s wife Kaede (Mieko Harada) insists on him asserting his rights as overlord of the Ichimonji, and Hidetora finds his recollections of the terms of his abdication differ from the record offered by Taro. (Kaeda isn’t just doing this on a whim – she was born in the First Castle and raised there before Hidetora conquered it, so now she is mistress of the Castle it make sense that she resents any authority Hidetora tries to exert.) As the family bonds between father and son break down, soon enough the brothers find themselves pitted against each other, and eventually Hidetota finds himself an exile in his own lands, with only his court jester Kyoami (Peter) for company, forced to witness first-hand the utter destruction of the peace he tried to engineer as war engulfs the land.
After reimagining Macbeth as the magnificent Throne of Blood back in the 1950s, Kurosawa returned to Shakespeare in 1985 to produce Ran using King Lear as the primary source material, but also incorporating changes and scenes based on apocryphal stories of the real daimyo Mori Motonari. The most famous of these latter bits is the early sequence where Hidetora hands a single arrow to each of his sons, who can each break their single arrow easily, and then hands each of them a bundle of three, which they cannot break, to demonstrate that three together can survive when each alone would be destroyed; the parable is twisted around this time, since Saburo demonstrates that you can actually break the bundle of three if you use the right technique – demonstrating not only that Hidetora’s analogy isn’t as clever as he thinks, but that the whole power-of-three business only works if all three buy into it, and as events demonstrate none of them do.
The legend of King Lear is rooted in the hubris of trying to dictate how matters are to be handled after one has stepped back and relinquished your power; this is the case in Shakespeare, and to a certain extent it’s true of the original account of King Leir as found in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey was writing in the early years of the Anarchy, and it’s not difficult to see the Leir story as a commentary on King Henry I’s doomed attempt to convince the rulers of England to accept his daughter Matilda as their Queen; naturally, they all played along in life and then went back on their vows as soon as Henry died.
The Henry comparisons stand here too; it is made clear that in his own time Hidetora was a terror on the land, as was King Henry I, who grabbed the crown of England after his brother William II died in suspiciously close proximity to him, snatched Normandy whilst his other brother Robert was away on Crusade, and then defeated Robert in war and kept him prisoner for the rest of his life, running proxy wars on the continent to stop William Clito, Robert’s son, from establishing any sort of power base which would let him challenge for the throne of England.
In emphasising Hidetora’s old war crimes, Kurosawa adds another layer to the story: now Hidetora is not just guilty of the hubris of trying to set his mark on the world even after his time has passed, but he is also reaping what he sowed in his younger days; having created his fiefdom through violence, he is now doomed to see it undone through violence.
It is through his sons’ wives that the consequences of Hidetora’s cruelty come home to roost. Everyone Lady Kaeda cared about in her youth died hwne Hidetora took the First Castle; in her playing of the brothers against each other, she is intent on seeing the Ichimonji clan’s ruin, just as Hidetora was her own family’s ruin. Lady Sue (Yoshiko Miyazaki), Jiro’s wife, is one of the few survivors of a clan that Hidetora destroyed; now he can’t stand to see Sue showing familial affection for him in light of that.
One of the other members of that clan is Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura), Sue’s brother who was blinded as a youth by Hidetora so that he could not lead the remnants of his clan against the Ichimonji conquerors. Living as a Buddhist monk and mastering the flute, Tsurumaru is responsible for some of the film’s most haunting scenes – aside from its absolutely agonising final shot, there’s an eerie sequence where he plays flute for Hidetora and seems to torture him with his playing, like casting a spell. (This is heightened by the fact that Tsurumaru seems to often be mistaken for a woman, and indeed is made up to look a bit like the lonely witch of Throne of Blood).
Tsurumaru’s role in the film is perhaps the most bleak, because if he is the most notable religious character in the movie, his faith seems to have done nothing for him. Years of meditation have done nothing to detach him for the resentment he holds for Hidetora; it cannot hold back the destruction that engulfs the land, or guide him to safety when he is the only survivor.
Kurosawa enjoyed the biggest budget a Japanese movie had ever known when he was making this one, and he clearly didn’t waste it. The movie is an astonishing visual feast, with amazing shots of Japanese mountain wilderness, meticulously designed sets, and some astonishing scenes, including some of the most harrowing battles I’ve ever seen in a movie.
For instance, take the sequence in which Hidetora’s household guard and concubines are slaughtered, the first part of which is set to music with no diegetic sound or dialogue; only the visuals remain to depict an astonishingly grim battle. Then, when the music abruptly stops and the gunfire and screaming comes roaring back as a new force arrives on the scene, the effect is like being plunged into Hell. By the end of it, Hidetora looks utterly shattered, staggering forth from the burning castle in a state of such emotional devastation that nobody can bring themselves to strike him. There are no model shots or false facades here; Kurosawa had his crew actually build the castle, filmed the assault on the castle , and then burned the motherfucker to the ground. The windstorm after the battle looks like the end of the world, which is of course the intention.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 