Ran is Japanese filmmaker
Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (
Tatsuya Nakadai),
who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his
three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flattery of his
treacherous sons (
Akira Terao and
Jinpachi Nezu), while banishing his youngest son (
Daisuke Ryu),
the only member of the family who loves him enough to tell him the
unvarnished truth. Thanks to his foolish pride, his domain collapses
under its own weight as the sons battle each other over total control.
Kurosawa's first film in five years,
Ran had been in the planning stages for twice that long;
Kurosawa
had storyboarded the project with a series of vivid color paintings
that have since been published in book form in England. The battle
scenes are staged with such brutal vigor that it's hard to imagine that
the director was 75 years old at the time. This 160-minute historical
epic won several international awards, but it was not a hit in Japan,
and it would be five more years before
Kurosawa would be able to finance another picture.
