MOVING PICTURES

Japanese works inspired by The Bard

BELCOURT THEATRE’S NEW 'SHAKESPEARE/KUROSAWA X3' IS THE SLEEPER SERIES OF THE SEASON

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

The Belcourt Theatre celebrated Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday with a summer-long celebration of the scion of postwar, action-based samurai cinema in 2010. That retrospective featured a dozen movies spanning the master’s entire career. The Belcourt’s new Shakespeare/Kurosawa X3 program is a relatively modest affair focused on three of the Japanese director’s works inspired by The Bard. The series itself is inspired by the New Year’s Day release of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth. The Kurosawa program creates an interesting context alongside this latest cinematic Shakespeare adaptation, and — while it only includes three of Kurosawa’s films — this new series includes Kurosawa’s greatest film, and Shakespeare/Kurosawa X3 should be on your movie-viewing radar. Ran (1985) looks like Kurosawa took a time machine back to Sengoku-period Japan where he filmed the tragedy that unfolds in the aftermath of an aging warlord abdicating his rule to his three sons.

With no CGI Kurosawa gives us a ravishing epic packed with extras colliding in jaw-dropping battle scenes that crash and slash and burn and bleed with impeccable realism. Kurosawa’s best film is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the family and political drama in Ran are more than a match for the go-for-broke action. Although Ran includes some of the most over-the-top military clashes ever filmed, what makes this movie standout in Kurosawa’s filmography is its still formality. While Kurosawa pioneered multiple-camera shooting techniques to capture his overpopulated fighting scenes, Ran is mostly made-up of a cornucopia of long, locked-off shots that evoke the slow pace of feudal Japanese life, giving viewers an opportunity to luxuriate in Ran’s ravishing color palette and wonder at the dynamic designs of the great Emi Wada who won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Ran. Ran screens Saturday, Jan. 15, and Sunday, Jan.16. Shakespeare/Kurosawa X3 kicks off with Kurosawa’s take on Macbeth, Throne of Blood (1957). The director’s adaptation pairs The Bard’s story about ambition and deceit with a distinctively Japanese visual style heavily influenced by the aesthetics of Noh theater. The great Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada play General Washizu and his wife Asaji – characters based on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. While Kurosawa borrows from Shakespeare’s characters and plot points he doesn’t bother to actually attempt to translate the play’s original poetry into Japa-nese. Instead it’s Asakazu Nakai’s cinematography that brings much of the poetry to the film’s frames with balanced compositions of characters in stylized poses – Nakai brought this same sensibility to Ran 28 years later. Production designer Yoshiro Muraki makes Nakai’s work easier here with his gorgeous black castle walls awash in fog and mist like something out of a Japanese scroll design. Throne of Blood screens on Saturday, Jan. 8 and Sunday, Jan. 9. The Bad Sleep Well (1960) also features Mifune in a modern tale about a young executive who hunts down his father’s killer. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds me of Michael Almereyda’s excellent telling of the Dane’s story (Hamlet, 2000) in its re-casting of feudal Denmark in favor of contemporaneous capitalism and business culture. I love an intriguing corporate drama as much as the next movie lover, but Kurosawa ups the ante here by borrowing a film noir look for this film, bringing a sharp and sinister atmosphere to this exploration of greed and corruption. It’s interesting to note that The Bad Sleep Well was the first movie created by the director’s own Kurosawa Productions, and I wonder if the pressures of financing his own movies wasn’t one of the elements providing the dark currents that inform this treacherous tale. The Bad Sleep Well screens on Saturday, Jan. 22, and Sunday, Jan. 23.

Go to www.belcourt.org for times and tickets.

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.