From King Lear to Ran
In a few weeks I’ll be finished with the Lord of the Rings trio of novels and I will address all three movies in what could potentially be a very long post, although I’m determined to keep it short. In the meantime, this week and next, I’m going to spend a little bit of time with Shakespeare and Akira Kurosawa. First I will review Ran (1985), which is based on King Lear, and second will be Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957), adapted from Macbeth.
King Lear begins with an aging king who decides to split his kingdom between his three daughters. Before he does this however, he asks each woman in turn how much she loves him. His oldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, express themselves with much fawning, eloquent language which he enjoys, but in reality they desire only their shares of the kingdom and think him an intolerable dotard. The youngest, Cordelia, expresses her true love for him in plain language without flattery, angering Lear enough to banish her and split his kingdom in half between his remaining children. Goneril and Regan prove to be inhospitable, eventually forcing their father out into the wilderness where he goes mad with the realization that he has exiled his true daughter. Lear and Cordelia are reunited in the end, but only briefly before she is killed and the king expires. Alongside the main story is a second, which sees more sibling rivalry between the two sons of the Earl of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund. Edmund is Gloucester’s illegitimate son, and plots against the legitimate Edgar for his inheritance. Edgar is banished, Gloucester has his eyes plucked out Kill Bill style (the stage directions even suggest stepping on the eye!), and Edmund instigates a competition between Goneril and Regan that leads them to kill one another. Not everyone is dead, but of the original core cast of nine, only three survive. King Lear is an excellent example of the destruction caused by greed for power and influence.
In Ran we sees that the equivalent of King Lear (Lord Hidetora) has three sons (Taro, Jiro, Saburo) instead of daughters and lives in sixteenth-century Japan. Saburo is exiled in the first scene for disagreeing with his father’s decision to divide the kingdom. A beautifully poignant scene, it gives the viewer a chance to see how each son reacts to his father’s failing health and get a glimpse of their personalities.
A character worth mentioning from Ran is Lady Kaede, who is wife to Taro. However, do not assume for a moment that because she is a woman or a wife that she has no significance. Kaede is an essential member of the cast, and her greed for revenge is a driving force of the plot. When she was sent away from her family to marry Taro, her father and brothers were killed by Hidetora in battle and her mother committed suicide as a result. Kaede’s actions may at first be perceived as power grabs, but they are actually machinations in a plot to destroy the entire family. There are no characters in the film who directly hold the place of Gloucester, Edmund or Edgar. Rather, their characteristics are scattered about within other persons of the movie. If anyone is to take the place of Edmund, it would be Kaede. She has a natural affinity for evil and a definitive idea of how exactly she will carry out her revenge. After Taro is killed in battle, Kaede seduces Jiro and convinces him to take her as his concubine. At the film’s end the entire clan is dead. While most of the violence can be considered the direct consequence of Hidetora’s poor diplomacy, in hindsight you can see the intricate web that Kaede weaves. Her influence is so great and so complete that no man dares refuse an order. They can only watch restlessly as she tears the clan apart from within.
Ran is a really spectacular view of cause and effect. The viewer is made acutely aware of the horror of Hidetora’s reign, and it only makes sense that such a violent end would compliment the violent beginnings. The film and play are both so full of death and destruction because we need to feel the way the characters descend into moral depravity once they choose the path of power. Although some details may be changed, this theme and the others (love of parent and child, old age, madness, homelessness, regret, forgiveness) remain intact from King Lear to Ran, and that is what makes the movie a really fantastic adaptation.