ran (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, masato ide)

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.  

the bad sleep well (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, eijirô hisaita, ryûzô kikushima, shinobu hashimoto)

Kurosowa’s modern day take on Hamlet is in stark contrast to his other Shakespeare versions. Any film that opens with a twenty minute wedding set piece can hardly be called pared down, but in contrast to Ran and Throne of Blood, this is a sober vision of Shakespeare, with Nishi, his Hamlet, a superbly tailored, charismatic protagonist. (As an aside, the tailoring in the film captures the eye just as much as it does with the more flamboyant period films. Kurosowa’s eye for detail is always both exquisite and to the film’s benefit.) There’s a brooding confidence in this opening. We are introduced to a large cast, located in a complex plot. It’s too much for the viewer to take on board; nevertheless details - the drunken brother-in-law, the second wedding cake, the crippled bride - leap out. As the film unfolds, everything we have seen begins to makes increasing sense. The opening is a puzzle which the film will resolve. Nowadays, there’s a phobia of losing the audience in the first ten minutes, which prohibits this type of approach, (reminiscent of The Deer Hunter), but Kurosowa reveals how effective it can be. 

As the film takes shape, the connections to the source material start to become apparent. This is a film about corruption and families, which feels just as relevant as ever. The Shakespearian element maps onto 1950s Japanese politics, not to mention 21st C USA politics. Kurosowa’s Nishi-Hamlet is an unashamed hero, the doubts articulated by Hamlet himself are kept at bay. The Japanese director’s fascination is focused on the way he exercises his revenge for his father’s death, infiltrating himself into the confidence of the company boss by marrying his daughter and making himself indispensable in the workplace. The more brilliant his strategy, the more terrible his eventual fate. The Bad Sleep Well is a jaunty 140 minutes, which never drag, a kind of vertical insertion into the closed world of post-war Japanese power which feels like a hybrid of The West Wing and The Sweet Smell of Success. 

throne of blood (w&d kurosowa, w hideo oguni, shinobu hashimoto, ryûzô kikushima)

Cinemateca blesses us with a brief season of Kurosowa’s Shakespeares. For which one is grateful. Grateful to Cinemateca, grateful to cinema, grateful that we are allowed to sit in a cinema at all. Throne of Blood, the director’s take on Macbeth goes unashamedly epic. There’s a lot of galloping horses, a lot of dust and smoke and mist, some of the greatest costumes ever worn, and a truly brilliant closing sequences as Washizu, Kurosowa’s Macbeth, is pinned with arrows fired by his own men. This isn’t the only radical variation on Shakespeare’s narrative the director employs. The relationship between Washizu and his Lady Macbeth, Lady Washizu, is dark and compelling, as it shuold be, with Isuzu Yamada giving a mesmerising performance. But K introduces the twist that she’s pregnant, a fact which helps to justify Washizu’s decision to murder his old friend, Miki (Banquo). Kurosowa also has Washizu visit Lady Washizu as she frantically washes her hands, having gone mad at the end. Washizu has to confront the result of his actions in a way Shakespeare doesn’t make him. This leads to the closing sequence, where Toshirô Mifune’s, bravura acting feels completely right. This is a heroic, warrior Macbeth, brought down by his own code, in spite of his earthy, military goodwill, seen in the earlier scenes with his friend, Miki. The director relishes the clash between the theatre and cinema. There’s a grand theatricality of the spectacle at work in the film, something one can’t help thinking Shakespeare might have been jealous of. The martial elements of Macbeth operate on a thematic and aesthetic level. In the battle scenes the cinema screen becomes a vast stage; one which is in contrast to the pared down intimacy of the scenes with Lady Macbeth or the banquet. Macbeth becomes someone trapped between the exaggerated grandeur of war as spectacle and the intensity of the reduced palette of domestic life, a tension which overwhelms him. At least he dies spectacularly. A fitting end for a man whose machismo cannot be pinned down in the normal sphere of existence. 

akahige (redbeard) (w&d kurosawa w. masato ide, hideo oguni, ryûzô kikushima)

One of the joys of cinema is the gradual process of discovering a filmmaker’s works. I saw Ran twice when it came out, the second time with Sedley, as we had promised him we’d watch it with him, so we never told him we’d already seen it, unable to resist, in that fine old cinema on St Martin’s Lane which was later turned into a gym. Watching Ran for me (not so much for my companion for obvious reasons) was a leap into an unknown world. The overarching vision of the filmmaker, pinning Shakespeare’s art to a culture which still seemed wildly remote, Martian. 

Since then I have signally failed to engage with Japanese cinema. A brief flirtation with Teshigahara, but no Ozu and little Kurosawa. Cinemateca might allow me to put that right. Perhaps for this reason, even though some critics suggest it is a minor work, Redbeard struck me as an astonishing piece of filmmaking. A director working on both a cinematic and philosophical scale which few can have matched. 

Cinematically, the use of light is a constant wonder. People who know always talk a lot about the use of light in cinema. I’m part-phiilstine, so rarely feel the impact. But in Redbeard, the chiaroscuro is frequently breathtaking. Eyes are perfectly framed in a tiny pool of light, surrounded by shade. The play of light and darkness speaks to the moral world the film explores. At times you feel like it would be possible to switch off the sound and subtitles and bathe in the film’s texture.

Philosophically, the complexity of Kurosawa’s vision is in stark contrast to the simplified moral world so much Anglo-Saxon cinema occupies. The film is in some ways a meditation on education; how rigid social codes close down the capacity of those who feel themselves outside those codes to develop a moral education. A thief becomes the most sympathetic character in the whole film; an angry girl is taught how to love by being shown love, rather than discipline. Through all this, the arrogant young doctor himself, Yasumoto, is educated through being exposed to the realities of the world beyond his immediate social circle. Kurosawa uses the broad stage of the charity hospital as a model of social existence. In the face of death or disease, we are all equal. This uber-democratic motto gives a philosophical force to the director’s humanist message, which resonates above and beyond the geographical context of his film.