[March 23 1910, legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was born. To celebrate the centennial of his life, his prolific contributions to the world of cinema, and immense impact on the hearts and minds of those quietly mourning his absence, staffers at Row Three are (rather enthusiastically) taking this opportunity to share their own experiences of the Kurosawa catalogue]
After an extraordinarily productive first 25 years of filmmaking (at a clip of about one film a year), Akira Kurosawa’s next quarter century (1965-90) saw only 6 of his films get made. Battling with the rise of television, declining interest in his style of filmmaking and growing health problems, Kurosawa found it difficult to get a film produced. After being let go from the directorial duties of the Japanese portion of Tora, Tora, Tora, Kurosawa attempted to go independent with 3 other cohorts. The venture, however, was unsuccessful when his first film under its banner (1970′s Dodes’kaden) helped bankrupt the company. A suicide attempt followed and he had continuing funding woes after recovering – his next film was the Russian made Dersu Uzala and following films required help from outside Japan (most famously from U.S. directors such as Francis Foird Coppola, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese). More hard luck was still to come for the now ageing director, but after a “trial run” with 1980′s Kagemusha, he completed his crowning achievement in 1985: the gorgeous epic Ran.
Partially based on King Lear, the story was something Kurosawa had been ruminating upon for at least a decade and manages to dovetail many varied ideas into it (e.g. the Japanese Noh theatrical makeup and acting style for his main character) while also changing some of the basic themes from Shakespeare’s play. Both are tragedies, but Kurosawa hits harder at the human lust for power and our desire for retribution at any cost. The film opens with a wild boar hunt being led by Lord Hidetaro Ichimonji and his three sons. They relax afterwards on the grounds of their vast kingdom and Hidetaro, getting on in years and tired from the pursuit, drifts off to sleep and has a dream. It’s a nightmarish scenario about being completely alone in the world and it prompts him to step down as ruler and hand over the title to his eldest son Taro. Of course, this is met with howls of protest (even from Taro), but it’s only the youngest son Saburo who confronts the old man with a reality check:
“You spilled an ocean of blood. You showed no mercy, no pity. We too are children of this age… weaned on strife and chaos. We are your sons, yet you count on our fidelity. In my eyes, that makes you a fool. A senile old fool!”
For his honesty, Saburo is banished. So begins the unraveling of the kingdom.
(4/5)
Bob and Carol (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) attend a self-discovery retreat, initially because Bob intends to make a film about it, but after a revelatory and emotional group counseling session, they become believers and want to share their new-found enlightenment with their best friends Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon). But Ted and Alice aren’t quite ready for their friends’ touchy-feely gospel and being told that they should live in total openness and truth makes them more uncomfortable than anything. Here I expected the film to side with Bob and Carol unequivocally and paint Ted and Alice as hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch. But actually, the film is more balanced and thoughtful than that.
(4.5/5)
Young Ana has two questions for her older sister Isabel: Why did the monster kill the little girl, and why did the villagers kill the monster? The fact that she doesn’t wholly connect the two events together perhaps makes it less surprising that she soon identifies much more with the monster than the villagers (the lack of perceived causal connection between the two also indicates to the audience that we shouldn’t look for exact 1:1 correlations between 
Isabel effectively replaces the mythology of the movie with mythology of her own, fundamentally affecting Ana’s imagination and actions through the rest of the film. Ana becomes obsessed with finding Frankenstein, returning to the abandoned house time after time. She feels that he would be a friend to her – though it isn’t clear in the film, her quiet shyness seems to make her something of an anomaly among the village children. A few events involving a deserter soldier eventually occur near the house that drive Ana even further into her imagination, and perhaps into madness. The thing that makes all of this so fascinating is writer/director Victor Erice’s understanding of imagination – everything Ana does and sees is filtered through her imagination and her imaginative perception of the film, and as such, everything makes perfect sense, even though trying to make direct connections with 
In fact, perhaps the greatest thing about the film as a whole is Erice’s extremely subtle approach. In one violent scene that is a turning point in the film, he shows nothing but distant gunfire, then cuts to the aftermath. When Ana first visits the abandoned house, the forbidding darkness inside contrasts so strongly with the bright outdoors that it looks like an impenetrable barrier to entrance, creating through a basic visual an intense sense of mystery and dread. Whatever the mother is doing with her letter-writing is never made clear – we retain the children’s in-the-dark viewpoint on adult matters. This subtlety yields a moody, mesmerizing quality, with the sense that everything is happening just under the surface – reinforcing that the driving force in the film is not anything that actually happens, but what happens in the imagination.
