Ran
Akira Kurosawa's visually stunning take on Shakespeare's King Lear comes to Blu-ray to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death
A battle rages and the screen is filled with flying arrows, flames and bloodied corpses. Everything here is familiar but in any given moment there's a glimpse of unplaceable beauty. It’s only when the action slows right down and there’s time to sweep the screen slowly and take in every piece independently that you really see how perfectly Kurosawa has composed each scene. The placement of everything, the pace of everything, the crimson of each splash of blood and the mist that rolls across the mountains – everything has been arranged exactly so.
Ran was the historical epic that crowned Kurosawa’s illustrious career, a dazzling, boldly coloured return to form following a period of personal distress and professional inertia. Rereleased by StudioCanal to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, his breathtaking adaptation of King Lear proves, so far at least, to be as immune to the effects of time as the original. They might have been divided by centuries and continents but through pure mastery of their craft, Sensei and the Bard now occupy the same position of total reverence within their medium.
Extras
The second disk of the new edition offers interviews with various members of the cast and crew, all of whom shed a little light from another angle on to the mythos of Kurosawa. Taken in tandem with the naturalistic documentary AK, the extras provide not only anecdotes and factoids to supplement the film, but actually offer a deeper appreciation of the meditative methods by which it was made, a sense of which is imbued in every frame of the finished film. For example: in one moonlit scene in which the grass glistens gold against the black of the night, the moon wasn't sitting where Kurosawa wanted it to be. So he drew his own and hung it in the sky.
Ran is release 2 May by StudioCanal – order your copy here