It’s perhaps hard now to divorce Rashomon from it’s own cultural legacy. yet, Akira Kurosawa‘s great pondering on truth, lies, and the reliability of memory is in many ways as fresh today as it was in 1950. The Jidaigeki crime thriller has become synonymous with stories about multiple characters offering conflicting versions of the truth. Now a full 73 years after the original release, the 2008 remaster has been granted a new theatrical run.
Three men, a Buddhist priest (Minoru Chiaki), a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), and a vagabond (Kichijirô Ueda) meet during a thunderous downpour as they take shelter under the towering ruin of the Rashomon Gate. Here the other two regale the vagabond with both their own, and other people’s vastly differing accounts of a heinous crime that occurred in a cedar grove, outside Kyoto. Through this, and the cynicism of the vagabond, they begin to explore the nature of truth, greed, and self-image.
Rashomon takes its basis in a pair of short stories written by early 20th century modernist Japanese writer, Ryûnosuke Akutagawa. In a Grove, a story made up from a series of epistolary accounts of a crime, and Rashōmon, a brief morality play set upon the titular gate during a storm. From the meat of these two stories Akira Kurosawa and frequent writing collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto melded the ideas and themes of both tales into a single philosophical treatise on the nature of truth and honesty.
The crime itself, the rape of a Japanese woman along with the capture and murder of her samurai husband, is told and retold in such differing manners, that it manages to illicit a surprising range of emotions. More fascinatingly, the film manages to swing the audience’s sympathies back and forth between the characters of the wife (Machiko Kyō), her husband (Masayuki Mori) and the bandit (Toshirô Mifune). Mifune especially shines as the cackling bandit who knows he is destined to be hanged regardless, while Kyō balances the difficult act of having to be alternatingly sympathetic, and cruelly manipulative by turns.
Modern audiences might balk a little at some of the unavoidable facets of 1950s cinema on display. Many moments of less than perfect ADR, a pace that is surprisingly languid to begin with, and some scenes going on a little longer than necessary. But the overall effect of the piece is still powerful; as the story has the ability to shock, sadden, and even more surprisingly, send the audience into fits of laughter. It’s a fine showcase of the ingenuity of early Kurosawa, and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa in what would become the film that made them known to the wider world.
Given the cultural weight, and the historical import of the film, it’s difficult to deny it’s worth. But even seven decades on from the original release, the film still has the ability to ask many questions of its audience, and for that alone, it deserves a revisit in its original cinematic form.
On limited release in cinemas