Review: Rashomon

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto. Reissued by Janus Films.

(Note: Specific plot points discussed, so beware of spoilers.)

Rashomon was Kurosawa’s first big international hit, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and being recognized with an Honorary Academy Award in the US (Oscars for foreign films were not awarded at the time). It made a star of Toshiro Mifune, the film’s leading actor. And Kurosawa, of course, went on to create any number of classic films, eventually passing away in 1998 with his status as a master of cinema secure.

The film’s great contribution to cinema is its structure of dueling flashbacks. After a wealthy man is found slain in the woods, a notorious bandit Tajomaru (played by Mifune) is arrested, and he tells the court that he lured the dead man into the woods to capture him and rape his wife. A duel between the two men follows, and Tajomaru tells of his respect for his adversary and his honorable death. When the wife – and then the dead man, summoned by a medium – give their stories, however, their testimony hardly matches Tajomaru’s, and in all we see four distinct, incompatible versions of the events.

By all accounts, Rashomon introduced the concept of unreliable flashbacks to a wide audience, and the film’s influences can still be seen today. Recently, films like Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects and Joe Wright’s Atonement have used the device to pull the rug out from under their viewers, but Kurosawa’s intentions are more complex. He questions not just the reliability of eyewitness testimony but the nature of memory and even objective truth itself.

After all, the natural question to ask is which of the film’s characters we can believe? The answer seems to be that all of them have motives to hide the truth not just from the court but from themselves. The plain suggestion made by the film is that not only are these characters unreliable, but anyone’s interpretation of what they see and remember is based on their own personal motives and biases. Perhaps none of us are capable of relaying the objective truth of what we see, and if we can’t, does it even exist?

The movie also finds Kurosawa subtly mocking the well-known – and perhaps stereotypical – preoccupation with personal honor in Japanese society. Not only does each character give different testimony, but Tajomaru, the dead man, and his wife are all so driven to preserve their sense of honor that they each admit to being the killer rather than dishonoring themselves. Tajomaru has no difficulty admitting to being a rapist and a bandit, but he assures the court that he had nothing but respect for the man’s swordplay and gave the man an honorable death. The wife is so overcome by shame that she inadvertantly slays her husband, apparently in a trance. And the deceased himself claims to have committed suicide at the shame of being overcome by a bandit and failing to protect his wife. In a society that was still reeling from their destruction during World War II, this must have seemed like a hollow joke, and indeed the film – and Kurosawa himself – was not popular with Japanese moviegoers at the time.

To be completely honest, I don’t think Rashomon holds up as well as many other Japanese classics. The framing device, featuring three men holed up during a storm in a ruined castle, doesn’t really cohere with the rest of the film, and seems to contain as much heavy-handed symbolic importance as narrative relevance. At times, the pacing lags. And the ending veers dangerously close to outright mawkishness. Personally, among Kurosawa’s 1950s work, I much prefer Throne of Blood or Ikiru.

Yet it’s undeniably an important film. I was lucky enough to see a newly restored 35mm print that’s playing here in Chicago, and it looks wonderful. Hopefully, this restoration makes its way to DVD (and Blu-ray!). Whatever its minor flaws, it’s certainly essential viewing for anyone interested in Japanese film and foreign film in general.