
NOTE: There’s likely to be spoilers in this thing. If it’s
going to bother you, I’d highly suggest not reading ahead until you’ve seen the
film in question.
Grade: 98/A
It’s hyperbolic to suggest that a film “changed everything,”
but it’s hard not to be hyperbolic about 1950’s Rashomon. Akira Kurosawa’s first masterpiece took the formal and
thematic sophistication he’d built in his first decade as a director and found
a new way to tell a story, a structural gambit that was both radical for its
time and directly connected to the central questions of the film. In a way, it
serves not only as an introduction of a master director to the West (the film’s
triumph at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Awards shot him to the top
of the list of great foreign filmmakers of the 1950s), but as Kurosawa’s thesis
statement on humanity, moral failure, and the capacity for acts of great evil and good.
A woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and
a commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) gather under the Rashomon city gate to stay dry in
a severe rainstorm. The priest is shaken by a story regaled to him by the
woodcutter, about the murder of a samurai (Masayuki Mori) and the rape of his
wife (Machiko Kyō) by the notorious bandit Tajōmaru (Toshiro Mifune).
The woodcutter then repeats the story for the commoner,
first telling it from the testimonial of Tajōmaru, who claims the wife
consented and he killed the husband honorably in a duel (after which the wife
ran, frightened). But the wife’s story is varies greatly, as she claims that
the bandit left her after the rape and the husband loathed her for being
dishonored. And the samurai’s story (as told through a medium) is different
still, claiming that his wife begged the samurai to kill him and he committed
suicide after the incident. All three have twisted the story to their
advantage, and while pieces of each might have some veracity, the plain and
simple truth becomes hazier with each tale.
Kurosawa opens the film in the middle of a rainstorm, one of
his many uses of weather to suggest a world bearing down on its inhabitants,
and the sound of a drum and strings to suggest that something is
not right with the world. Shimura and Chiaki are introduced slouching with
bone-deep spiritual exhaustion; Shimura in particular is our moral center to
the film, so his drooping, pained expression and grave intonations of the
world’s disorder brings us into the inquisitive, mournful mood that Kurosawa wants
us to be in. Why can’t we treat each other better?
Still, Ueda is essential beyond the need to hear exactly
what it is that has Shimura and Chiaki so upset. Kurosawa often used the
lower-class to contrast with the high-minded pursuits of the samurai, and that
hits its stride here. The commoner is the healthy dose of skepticism in the
film’s moral inquiries, the one who sees horror of the story but can’t help but
point out that the idea man lying and killing for his own purposes isn’t
exactly a new concept, and that our solemn moral voices of reason are hardly
perfect themselves. It’s his presence that keeps the film’s morality from
falling into naïveté. Plus, he gives Kurosawa a chance to use deep focus to
contrast the ease and comfort in his body language with the way Shimura and
Chiaki seem to fold into themselves.
When Kurosawa comes to the testimonials, he wisely chooses
not to let the voices of the inquisitors be heard – he puts us in their
perspective, lets us imagine that we are
asking the questions, and puts us on their level, so as to hear their stories
and take them at face value until we can’t anymore. Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo
Miyagawa also get a lot of mileage out of slight contrasts in camera placement
for each witness: while the woodcutter
and the priest are shot from roughly the same objective angle, there’s a
greater distance when the arrested Tajōmaru and his captor are brought in. This
has nothing to do with need for greater space – Kurosawa could comfortably fit
both in the same shot from the same distance – and everything to do with making
us more frightened of Tajōmaru. When the cop reaches the end of his testimony,
the camera is closer to him, until it dollies out to show Tajōmaru lauging like
a maniac. We’re then brought onto the same level for him that we were for the
woodcutter and priest, then even closer…and we don’t want to be there.



When Kurosawa takes us into their takes on the incident, then,
we’re not just seeing what they see, but we’re seeing what they’re thinking
about, what the environment was like, where people were in relation to each
other. My fellow freelancer Kyle Turner wrote something on Letterboxd about how
he felt certain POV shots in these sequences didn’t make sense, given that
these sequences are about putting ourselves in their perspectives and these
shots imply another person’s presence. With all due respect, I feel a closer
comparison would be how David Cronenberg places Christopher Walken in the midst
of the murder when he flashes back to them in The Dead Zone. We’re now seeing everything
about their perspective and the incident as they describe it.

In the wife’s story, meanwhile, Kurosawa places greater
emphasis on wide shots to show her distance, her abandonment by both Tajōmaru
and her husband. A shot placed behind the husband, still bound, as she pleads
for him to stop looking at him lets us imagine the look of judgment and anger
on his face that she dare be violated. Fumio Hayasaka’s score takes on the
driving rhythms of Ravel’s “Bolero” (something I had no idea was intentional
until about a minute ago) in order to drum away at the wife’s remaining
defenses. The camera shifts, still only showing the wife but suggesting that
she can’t escape her husband’s terrible gaze no matter how she tries. We’re
brought closer to her perspective and in his hateful expression as she begs for
death, anything to escape her fate and judgment by the society; her pleas will
not be answered.

All of these stories are shot so as to best support the
given perspectives, but there’s a constant through all of them: the contrast
between shadows from the trees and light from the sun. The mixture of shadows
and light are there to suggest the moral ambiguity of the situation, the lies
that all of the storytellers are telling to support their respective versions. Miyagawa
is either the first or one of the first cinematographers to point a camera
directly into the sun, and it’s a striking effect, but it’s also an important
one to the storyline. One debated scene is whether, when the wife stares into
the sun, the sun goes out or stays shining, and whether or not both could
support the idea that evil is borne in that moment. To me, it’s as much about
the doubt of what happened in that
moment and in the aftermath, and the difficult need to search for the truth.
Perhaps we get closer to that truth in the fourth version of
the story, where the woodcutter, finally revealing that he was a witness to the
crime and not just a man who stumbled upon the aftermath, tells a version of
the story that makes all three parties look bad. The bandit is not a valiant
warrior, but a pitiful man who begged for the wife to be with him rather than
the husband. The husband becomes a worm of a man who’s self-important and
unforgiving of his wife. The wife becomes a new judgmental figure, one who
recognizes the weakness in both of them and can’t help but laugh at her
situation. Even the swordfight has changed: no longer the dynamic, highly
choreographed battle of Tajōmaru’s story, it’s now a pathetic battle between
two cowards; yet she’s also a coward in her own right, one who calls for blood
but can’t watch the fight. It’s all shot in a more objective way that doesn’t
psychologically support any of them, but rather undercuts them.
The woodcutter’s version is likely closest to the truth, yet
he omits that he stole the woman’s priceless dagger, which went missing after
the crime. This comes out after he, the commoner, and the priest find an
abandoned infant and the commoner chooses to steal the kimono protecting the
child; the commoner sees through he woodcutter’s moral superiority and calls
him out on his own misdeeds. That's also the real reason the woodcutter is so shaken by the story: it's not just the lies and selfishness of these people, but that they bring to light his own lies and selfishness – he's no better than them. It’s in this moment that the film’s focus shifts
from the subjectivity of truth to the question of whether morality is futile.
The commoner might be doing a low thing in stealing an abandoned child’s only
protection, but he has no illusions as to who he is. He does selfish things
because, as the film has illustrated in the earlier stories, that’s what needs
to be done to survive. The acts of goodness might not be worth a damn at all, and moral failure might be inevitable.

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Check out my account on Letterboxd, where you can see my lists of favorite films from any given year or decade, or just brief capsule reviews of whatever I’m watching in my spare time.
Check out my account on Letterboxd, where you can see my lists of favorite films from any given year or decade, or just brief capsule reviews of whatever I’m watching in my spare time.
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