A Japanese film constructed like a Chinese box, Rashomon is
still as pictorially ravishing as it is intellectually suspect. Set in
the 12th century, director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 international
breakthrough starts out like a bad joke: A priest, a woodcutter, and a
bum meet in a rainstorm …
But there are no laughs in Rashomon. It is a deadly serious
exploration of a recent rape/murder that grows ever more unfathomable
with each re-enactment, since its witnesses and participants hardly
seem to have witnessed the same thing. The tension and uncertainty
generated by the differing versions of the story spills into the film’s
divided soul: Kurosawa’s exhilarating modernist delight in remixing the
details and actions of the four versions of the crime is undercut by a
trite, undergraduate anti-humanism that threatens to spoil the
formalist party. The film claims to offer truth but leaves you feeling
as lost as its characters, who stare at the sun, the rain, and the sky
in search of answers to questions they can’t quite articulate.
The formal ingenuity triumphs over the “everybody’s a liar” conceit,
though. Rashomon remains one of the major treatments of what
Donald Richie called “relative reality,” and it’s set in the film
equivalent of a World Heritage site — a forest grove alive with
leaves, trees, sunlight and shadows as beguiling and mutable as the
characters’ testimony.
In a movie where every character eventually plays his own
doppelganger, Toshiro Mifune thrills as the bandit Tajomaru, a one-man
zoo who mimics the scratches and gaits of lions, gorillas, and pit-bull
terriers.
