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Dir. Akira Kurosawa
Rating: 8.8 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Lance Duroni
Bob Dylan once famously remarked that Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” was an improvement over his own. If William Shakespeare had the pleasure of viewing this Akira Kurosawa adaptation of King Lear, he might express similar sentiments.
Yes, it may be unfair to compare apples to oranges, theater to cinema, and the 20th century to the 16th; but there are several aspects of the samurai era in Japan that lend themselves nicely to this quintessential tragedy. First, the bonds of honor between samurai and lords, subjects and samurai, raise the stakes for everyone involved—what better setting for a tragedy than a time and place where suicide was the expectation for any transgression of honor? Also, the samurai had a fine-tuned aesthetic sensibility never been matched in the Western world -- I defy anyone to find a production of King Lear with costumes that compare to the dazzling, meticulously crafted attire in Ran (for which it deservedly won an Oscar). Finally, the setting of the strife-ridden Sengoku period in Japan allowed for an already very violent play to become an epic, thrilling orgy of conquest and slaughter. Muskets, katanas, spears, arrows and cavalry all mingle in a storm of destruction that Kurosawa sets to an unsettling classical score.
The changes Kurosawa incorporated are subtle, the most obvious being that the aging Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), caught in a succession battle between his three sons, whereas King Lear dealt with his three daughters. I’m not quite sure which villain in Lear Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) corresponds to, but she must be one of the scariest femme fatales in history. Harada shifts gears from a demure, tea-serving Geisha robot to a bloodthirsty maniac bitch in the course of one bow. Nakadai’s portrayal of Hidetora is wild and bizarre, injecting a little bit of Kabuki into old Lear. Kurosawa’s use of color, landscape and architecture to magnify the emotions of his characters and drive the pulse of the story may be the greatest of many achievements in this film, creating images with depth that linger long after the credits roll.
This Blu-Ray edition contains a horde of supplementary documentaries: two on Kurasawa (I recommend the one by Chris Marker), and one on samurai art and another on the art of war (a distinction that may have been lost on the samurai themselves).
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