Rashomon movie review

Japanese film-maker Akira Kurosawa is considered to be among the best film directors of all time, along-side Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, and others. And Rashomon is considered to be his best work because it provides deeper psychological insight into human nature. The film won the 1951 Venice Festival prize and the Academy Award for a best foreign film in 1952.

The story told by Rashomon is both surprisingly simple yet deceptively complex. The movie, which tells about the murder of a Samurai (Masayuki Mori) and sexual assault of a woman (Machiko Kyo), possibly by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), is presented entirely in flashbacks from the perspectives of four narrators.

An objective reality means that something is actual, so it exists independent of what a person’s mind might think. Subjective reality, on the other hand, means that something is actual depending on what the mind perceives it to be. But in real life, almost everything truth can be subjective, because a subjective truth is a truth based off of a person’s perspective, feelings, or opinions.

It is also generally accepted that the “reality” that we see around us is in large measure a construction, part personal, part resulting from our social environment and conditioning.

Through the film, the director asks whether does four sides of a story produces a stable, square truth, or you get something uneven and odd-looking? The director also questions man’s inherent goodness or badness. Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves; they cannot talk about themselves without embellishing, and also they will tell you stories that suit their own personalities and social conditions.

The beginning of the film shows people near Kyoto’s Rashomon gate discussing a recent crime that has shocked the region. This is the place where people usually come and discuss about things like fate, god, humanity, and other things. A woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who is witness to the events, and a priest (Minoru Chiaki) ponder over what really happened, and what such a horrible occurrence says about human nature. The detached common-man listens to and comments upon their stories.

The central section of the film, a series of flashbacks and tales within tales, consists of the same events retold by the husband (speaking through a medium, from the grave), the wife, the bandit, and the woodcutter. Each tells what happened–or possibly, what should have happened.

Basically, the film deals with multiple truths. In each of the four versions of the story, the characters are the same, as are many of the details. But much is different, as well.

In the first account, that of the bandit, the criminal accepts culpability for the murder but refutes the charge of rape, saying that it was an act of mutual consent. The woman’s story affirms that the bandit attacked her, but indicates that she may have been the murderess. The dead man’s tale (told through a medium, from the graves) claims rape and suicide. The only “impartial” witness, the woodcutter, weaves a story that intertwines elements of the other three, leaving the viewer wondering if he truly saw anything at all. While the woodcutter seemed to be inconsistent in his versions, one good thing he does is that he takes the abandoned child with him.

For the audience, the details of a single terrible afternoon in the forest don’t add up because they’re coming from different people. The same incident is repeated and tweaked from competing perspectives, so the audience is not sure what to believe, and this destabilization made the movie so popular.

Donald Richie, who has written several books on the director Kurosawa, summarizes the director’s point of view by saying: “the world is an illusion, you yourself make a reality, but this reality undoes you if you submit to being limited by what you have made.”

What is different in the movie Rashomon, compared to other such films, is that the characters are not trying to avoid responsibility. They are in fact trying to claim responsibility for the death of the Samurai while avoiding responsibility for the rape. What director Kurosawa is trying to say is that guilt potentially distorts people’s memory and they are unlikely to offer a straightforward denial, and this observation offers great psychological insight.

The movie is a black-and-white film and the filmmaker uses several framing and lighting techniques to keep the audience guessing. Because there are several stories being told that manipulate and deceive, the camera morphs into each character’s story. It’s perhaps the first film where the impartiality of the camera is questioned.

In most scenes, the director makes the actors walk and pose as if they are animals. For example, when Mifune is stalking his target like how a predator targets its prey. In the fighting scenes, the characters hop like monkeys. What the director is trying to depict here is that at times people lose control and behave almost like animals – ravaging the samurai’s wife, the wife asking the bandit to kill her husband. These are examples that reveal how people can lose their control.

In the movie, you never see any judge or jury, the camera just sits in the position of authority while the defendants sit on a lawn, testifying. With the defendants pleading their cases, at times, one gets the feeling of watching theater and not really a movie.

The film does not issue any verdict in the end, and the director leaves it up to the audience, whom to trust and whom to not. The title Rashomon is the name of the ruined gate in Kyoto where, mostly, thieves and bandits hid themselves, but Kurosawa’s movie makes it more about a state of being.

You can see the commoner walking away saying that everybody is selfish and cares for personal gains, but the priest who had lost faith in mankind after hearing the various false versions is happy to see the wood-cutter taking away the abandoned child.

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