Ran [1985]

Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare. This week we are covering Akira Kurosawa's Ran.

I feel like these are skidding off the increasingly smooth surface of my wrinkleless brain, like the incident of the story is being articulated poorly and all I've got to grab onto is the melodramatic stakes of character mood/tone. Maybe it's just the heat lately.

These past two movies and also the Shelved By Genre podcast covering The Lord of the Rings, both books and movies, have got me thinking about the ways I engage with story and its use of ambiguity & metaphor; I think growing up largely post-CGI and post-narrative-videogame have really warped my sense of interpretation and atrophied my ability to grasp metaphors and analogies. I don't mean this in a "kids these days don't know how to examine thematic resonance" sense but more in a "the media that we consume is very directly representational, which isn't instilling a sense of wonder or imagination, isn't providing low-stakes disagreements for us to practice disagreeing and still getting along" type sense.

I think a particular frustration with the Lear story both here and in the 2018 adaptation are the limited agency (perceived agency, anyhow; for what character in a story ever has actual agency?) of its principle cast? Lear exhibits some when splitting up the kingdom, stepping down; much the rest of the play proceeds from that. Cordelia exhibits some when rallying allies from Burgundy, but that's insufficient to undo the tumult of the usurpers' factions.

I found Ran to be a very beautifully shot film — it very much observes my "movies should be colorful and good to look at" criteria (cough Janusz Kaminski cough) — but I found it just as frustrating as the 2018 King Lear to watch. The foolish king is no better than the fool. Power ceded is power squandered. I get it.

It is interesting to see an adaptation of King Lear that is stripped of some of the fables it is based on. I would strongly recommend this version over the 2018 adaptation, simply because it feels just as long but is much less brown; but if you want Kurosawa doing Shakespeare, I do feel that Throne of Blood is the better film.

Next week, we're watching the 1987 Godard adaptation. Thank you for watching along with My Year of Shakespeare.