Ran 40th Anniversary at FACT

Akira Kurosawa’s singular reimagining of King Lear is back on the big screen at Liverpool’s FACT, screening from a 35mm print for its 40th anniversary — trips to the cinema don’t get much better than this. The 1985 epic from the director of Seven Samurai rethinks and relocates Shakespeare’s play, moving the action to sixteenth-century Japan where armies of samurai do battle at the behest of their overlords.

Over a decade in the making, the film stars Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging Sengoku-period warlord who abdicates his position and divides his power between his three rival sons, for whom a third is not enough. Kurosawa never hid his admiration for western literature or Hollywood style, and he had borrowed from Shakespeare before for Throne of Blood, his 1957 reworking of Macbeth, and again in 1960 with The Bad Sleep Well, which incorporates elements of Hamlet. But there is no doubt that Ran is the most spectacular of Kurosawa’s dalliances with the Bard.

This late-period work takes as its subject the futility of war and the destructive, consuming nature of the desire for power. Kurosawa constructs his film on a vast scale with ferocious action combined with a mournful tone, as dazzling battle sequences depict bodies mounting in service of family feuding. Coming from a filmmaker who had helped bring global popularity to the samurai picture, Ran feels like something of an elegiac capstone.