Stereotypically, one might expect Japan’s greatest filmmaker to craft intricate, mysterious, emotionally opaque films with a subtly previously unknown to the West. And if you think that greatest filmmaker is Yasujiro Ozu, you’d be correct. But Kurosawa wears his heart on his sleeve, and his films, however stylistically intricate (and not being a film expert, I’m more or less blind to these subtleties) are political, emotionally raw, moralistic, at times even sentimental. In fact, Kurosawa was taken less seriously in his time by certain Japanese critics who found his sensibility “too Western.” Nowhere is this more evident than in my personal favorite, Ran (”Chaos”).

One of his last films, and executed in brilliant color, Ran (1985) seems like Kurosawa’s final judgement on the human race. And that judgement is a guilty verdict and a spiritual death sentence. The story is that of Shakespeare’s King Lear (although Kurosawa claims the Lear resemblance only developed as he was filming); he had previously interpreted Macbeth as Throne of Blood/Spiderweb Castle and Hamlet as The Bad Sleep Well. In this treatment Kurosawa even, as it were, one-ups Shakespeare in a devastating final scene of such cosmic despair that it is almost, at the same time, funny.

During the chaotic warring states period, clan warlord and patriarch Hidetora Ichimonji prepares to abdicate power to his three sons: the average, competent Taro, the weak and effeminate Jiro and the virtuous and common-sensical youngest son Saburo.

Above: What could possibly go wrong?

But like King Lear, Hidetora wants to have his cake and eat it; he will retain a ceremonial title and be treated with the same respect as before. More importantly, his sons will share power and support each other. He illustrates this to them by easily snapping a single arrow, then showing the strength of three arrows bundled together. But Saburo puts paid to this homespun wisdom by snapping the three arrows over his leg: his father’s naive and self-serving plan is doomed. And as the characters quickly scramble to seize power for themselves, the true villain of the piece emerges: Taro’s wife, the demonic Lady Kaede, one of the most terrifying characters in film, who bears a grudge against the Ichimonji clan for the murder of her own relatives.

Above: The dastardly Jiro tries to seduce his brother’s wife. Wait…huh?

What follows is a narrative of uninterrupted warfare, treachery and murder. Rarely has a film been so aptly titled, and rarely has violence been depicted so unsentimentally onscreen: Saburo’s castle is sacked and Hidetora, trying to flee, and in a long series of silent takes, sees soldiers butchering each other, the battlements in flames, and women assisting each other in ritual suicide. For anything on this scale, one must go perhaps to the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

Above: As the saying goes, be nice to your children, they’ll choose your nursing home

Of course, any film about war and chaos made in post-war Japan has political overtones. But here the single-minded preoccupation is with destroying any illusions we had about the value of human life. Ran is a film that leaves you shaken. But this is not cheap nihilism: Kurosawa challenges the viewer if there is anything to answer his vision.

Well. Is there?

Ran will be screened at the New York Film Forum February 5th-18th.