Cinema
Ran ('15', selected cinemas)
An Oriental Lear
Peter Ackroyd
It is clear from the start that this is going to be a very elaborate film — whether in the elaboration of gesture, which renders Japanese acting close to that of early Victorian melodrama, or in the elaboration of mood, as the camera lingers in front of a Picturesque landscape before intruding Upon some Japanese gentlemen in a sort of tent. The setting is 16th-century; a certain Lord Hidetora is making a speech; various Other Lords are mentioned, most of them eliciting staged expressions of heightened emotion; and there are some gnomic re- marks obviously representing some kind of folk wisdom. For a long period, in other words; nothing seems to be happening at all.
Then a familiar plot begins to emerge from the rubble of the audience's atten- tion: old Lord Hidetora is about to resign and hand over his province to three sons, one of whom refuses to make the ritual Obeisances of gratitude. And so only two S005 inherit the earth, although very soon they are demonstrating their perfidy by banishing their father's retainers . . . in Other words this is King Lear kimono-style, with just that little extra bit of violence Which seems to be so important in a samurai version. The script itself is hardly Shakespearian, however, at least in its subtitled version — Lord Hidetora banishes his noble son with the bare words "'You are a stranger to me! Out a sight!' And even the most avid follower of Akira Kurosawa, the director, would at some stage have to admit misgivings about this Particular venture — perhaps not quite as early as this point, as the thunder rolls across the beautifully photographed moun- tains, but as speech follows speech, as tabsurd confrontation succeeds absurd con- frontation, it becomes difficult to retain abY early interest provoked simply by Kurosawa's reputation. Of course it is 'beautifully photo- graphed', as everyone else has said, and there is no doubt that in visual terms the film is a success — the only powerful 'triages in the film are explicitly visual ones, and the fact that most of them are singular- IY contrived does not really matter a great ,deal. One has to have something in which to become interested, even if that interest is caught only by the pretty colours.
Such is the nature of Japanese perform- ance, in fact, that the actors scarcely seem to exist as individuals upon the screen: sometimes they are hardly noticeable in front of the landscapes, and sometimes the expression of high emotion is presented in so ritualised a way that it becomes almost impersonal; the latter device works suc- cessfully in the theatre, where all the conventions of the stage can heighten and reinforce impersonality, but in so 'natur- alistic' a medium as the cinema the ges- tures and rolling eyes can look faintly ludicrous. An exception should be made, however, for Mieko Harada as the Lady Kaede, a demented creature with exces- sively homicidal tendencies; she drifts like a sleep-walker (hence everyone says that she is 'like' Lady Macbeth); she brandishes a knife; she asks for someone's head to be pickled in salt; she even sucks a little blood from time to time. She is generally rather a vamp, and is quite the best thing in Ran — certainly more interesting than the so- called 'Fool', a transvestite who appears at odd moments and delivers himself of poig- nant little homilies.
In fact this is essentially Shakespeare drained of its poetry, stripped of its human dimension, and forced within a schematic framework derived from quite different attitudes or preoccupations. Only the bare mechanics of the plot are left and, although it might be claimed that a 16th-century Japanese warlord is closer to the actual situation of Lear than some 'contempor- ary' image at the National Theatre mere congruence of situation cannot compensate for the lack of momentum which turns this particular narrative only into a tableau of attitudes.
Of course that may be the point, and no doubt a Japanese audience would find much more here than meets the Western eye — but., unfortunate though it may be, one does have a Western eye and it is no good proclaiming this piece of puppet theatre as a masterpiece when the culture from which it comes remains an alien one.
(Audiences, if not critics, tend to be more honest about such matters: at the perform- ance I attended, there were all the usual signs of uncomfortable boredom, and the person sitting beside me actually fell asleep).
Things begin to perk up a little in the battle scenes, since it is an aspect of Kurosawa's stylised direction that he is able brilliantly to choreograph the move- ments of large numbers of people. In the end, one was longing for armies and spectacles just in order to forget about the plot but, even on the field of battle, there was a level of absurdity which caused some of the violence to seem merely comic — this 'does not necessarily mean that it was pleasant to watch, of course, and the general slaughter was only made worse when the violence was actually rendered picturesque. When this happens in Amer- ican films the director is accused of sensa- tionalism; when Kurosawa does it, it apparently becomes art. Nevertheless Ran is a laboured film, illuminated by fitful moments of spectacle but on the whole dull.
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