RAN is everything I wanted KAGEMUSHA to be. Intimate, thrilling, accessible, emotional, horrifying, and dramatically dazzling. A staggering, regal epic that not only looks like a painting, but uses its painterly vision to enhance the drama, characters, themes, and tragedy that soak in "an ocean of blood" during 16th century Japan. The bigness of its vision is tethered to the simplicity of its plot, one that possesses the frightening logic of a morality play and the brutal philosophy of a tyrant whose empire is beginning to implode on itself. RAN works precisely because of how it transforms the passion of the Bard into thunderous, eerily painted characters who express humanity's endless taste for destruction. 

RAN is not an empathy vehicle. It is a warning we watch and learn from, similar to THRONE OF BLOOD. It is cold and removed in this respect, similar to KAGEMUSHA, but never obtusely abstract or without emotion. It is the story of an aging warlord, the history of his bloody conquests we never see, but can infer through his ghost-like make-up. Here is a character, Hidetora, who has butchered people throughout his life in order to rule over the horizon and all that the sun touches, who is now tired and wants to set up conditions for his legacy of rule to continue. Inferring this terrible history early on is a critical part of making sense of all the violence, greed and vengeance ingrained in so many of the characters, for it is this very specific backstory that annihilates his plans for the future. 

Hidetora falsely believes, for instance, that by evenly dividing his kingdom among his three sons he'll be able to ordain peace and advance order after he steps down, but such plans can't possibly come about after nourishing his own seed for decades in the ways of violence, massacre and undiluted carnage. Tyrants beget tyrants. Hidetora cannot reap peace when he's only sewn horror. That's about as funny as the gambler in THE LOWER DEPTHS who feels that suicide has spoiled his fun. No, Hidetora is simply awakening to his own sins. He's made his bed and is now lying in it, which will become hauntingly clear later on when the land he once owned is reduced to smoke and ash. 

In that first 20 minutes when Hidetora rashly gives up his empire to his sons, Kurosawa is setting up via Shakespeare an unflinchingly pessimistic tragedy that can only end in despair, disaster and destruction. Oh, and a lot of madness too.

Some of the most fascinating scenes and characters are born from the very historical bloodshed that occurs offscreen. The shadows of Hidetora's past, for instance, rise up in the form of his three warring sons, who pile betrayal on top of betrayal until everyone has taken up arms against one another. The film's title literally means "chaos," but it can also be rendered as "rebellion," which makes sense in the context of Hidetora's sons rising up and rebelling against him. Such rebellion was learned through their father's history of ruthless slaughter, and marks the reason why they have no problem banishing him to the wilderness to go totally insane. Icy slay queen, Lady Kaede, is another fierce example of the kind of monster Hidetora's empire has helped create. With her father and brothers murdered by Hidetora back in the day, and her mother having commit suicide as a result, Lady Kaede is the perfect apotheosis of groomed hate and vengeance, someone who cannot rest until she's licked the blood from all her enemies. Tsurumaru, a character whose family was burned by Hidetora's warmongering, and who himself was blinded as a child by his vicious tactics, is yet another example of the kind of distressed nihilism left in the wake of Hidetora's reign. 

No scene better captures the horror of Hidetora's awakening to his own destructive legacy than when he sits lotus-style inside a burning castle while chaos reeks outside in a torrential fury of arrows, blood and fire. Watch Hidetora's face during these moments. It's absolutely exquisite. Alan Booth writes: It is the face of "intense inward turmoil of Lear himself." Hidetora, for the first time since his tyranny began, is beginning to see the fruits of his own labors spoil before his very eyes. There is fear, dread and failure in those eyes, like a prodigal who not only recognizes his reign is over, but who knows he's been cast to the suffering of the damned. His face pales to the point of becoming a ghostly Noh mask of the undead. Ritchie articulates further: "During the burning of the castle, each succeeding cut finds the makeup deepening until at the end the actor is "wearing" a known Noh mask, that of the old man who has, presumably, seen life." 

Makeup and design hasn't been used this effectively to communicate emotional illness since Fassbinder's expressionistic western WHITY. It's an utterly haunting moment that transforms him into a raving, broken madman. Kurosawa further explicates the power of the moment by following Hidetora into the open ruins, where he will sink deeper and deeper into the kind of madness made known only to tyrants on judgement day. 

We neither feel sorry for Hidetora nor relieved by the destruction around him. There is no room for catharsis, and rightfully so. Kurosawa keeps the mood at near-freezing temperatures, a similar trick he used in KAGEMUSHA to keep us distant from the thief's tragic freefall. Unlike KAGEMUSHA, however, Kurosawa has already provided a dramatic context in RAN from which the clarity of its cautionary sting can burn directly into our eyeballs. The tragedy is empirical, not abstract. It sinks not into our hearts, where compassion flows, but into our eyes, where judgment reigns, as we watch Hidetora's empire go up in a plume of smoke. As Ritchie states: "We do not need to experience Hidetora's agony. All we need do is watch it." Isn't it ironic, then, that the final perspective we assume in this bleak tale is the perspective of the blind man, Tsurumaru? He's last seen teetering on the edge of a cliff, a broken witness who can only sense, not see, the devastation that surrounds him. From his perspective, says Kurosawa, it's as though he's watched in some special way the collapse of Hidetora's empire "from heaven." 

The image of a blind man "watching" over the destruction of a family from on high is a powerful image, one that strikes me as bravely Kieślowskian. It is neither theist nor atheist, but humanist in its reach. In that final image Kurosawa allows the options of nihilism and theodicy to coexist, which is to say that the notion of "God is Dead" will forever live in contention with the notion of "God is weeping with us." "There are no Buddhas in today's world," says Hidetora. Later Kyoami screams to the heavens, "Do not slander God or the Buddha! They are the ones who are crying!" 

These contrary expressions take form on the perch, speaking to various forms of blindness. On top of that perch, like Tsurumaru, we are spiritually, emotionally, perhaps even physically blind and confused and without hope for the human race. Gods will not save us, because Gods do not exist. On top of that perch, like Tsurumaru, we are also weeping for all these blind creatures below us who revel in murder, chaos and bloodshed, who willfully choose suffering over peace, sadness over happiness. If there are Gods, they must be like this. The greatness of RAN is that it doesn't tell us which option to align ourselves with. Kurosawa seems to be mourning with the cynic and humanist alike, suggesting these are both valid realities. "I am lost," says Hidetora. "Such is the human condition," comes Kyoami's reply. On top of that perch, like Tsurumaru, we are all lost and afraid, condemned to passively watch the world self-destruct, or yearn, ache and suffer alongside it.

Kurosawa Ranked