I had two thoughts whilst watching the glorious spectacle that is Ran. The first, pure nostalgia. The peppered memories of watching the film at the Lumiere on Saint Martins’s Lane, a great lost London cinema, a time when watching a film from Japan felt like watching a film from Mars, so rich and strange, such a remove from the England of the eighties with the grim purview of Thatcher, unemployment, strikes, a country which felt as though it wanted to kneecap its youth. Youth, nevertheless can’t help but maintain its enthusiasm, its curiosity, the lust for life is insatiable, the need to experience the new, discover that which lurks on the other side. Ran was part of this. Part of this discovery, part of this unfolding of the world.
The second thought, which occurred to me in the closing half hour, as the final battle is painted on the cinema wall, was that Shakespeare himself would have loved watching Ran. It would have delighted him. He who robbed and rewrote the plays and stories of others, including King Leir, would have delighted in Kurosowa’s gender flips, the upgrading of the Fool, the development of the brilliantly scheming Goneril/ Regan role, Lady Kaede, who is given perhaps the greatest scene in the whole film. Shakespeare would have wondered at the use of cinema to realise the battles that existed in his imagination, he would have been thrilled by the way in which another culture appropriated this story, his story, which is one he himself appropriated. For a while, as I watched the horses charge, the awesome choreography of battle, I imagined I was Shakespeare, watching my play brought to another life, and I could feel his excitement, his wonder at the legacy he has left, allowing artists from other cultures, other times, to ransack his work for their inspiration.
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