Walking Kurosawa's Road: Rashomon (1950)

The inability to write about the films of Akira Kurosawa to my satisfaction led me to to take a different path: start at the beginning, take each film in sequence, one after the other, and watch the progression of the man from film-maker to Master. I'm hoping I can write more intelligently and more knowledgeably about his work by, step by step, Walking Kurosawa's Road.

Rashomon (aka Rashômon aka 羅生門) (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) It all changed here. This is the point—and this is the film—where Kurosawa got "noticed" by an international audience. Oh, he'd been toiling in the fields for a decade. But a war got in the way. Then, an occupation, with its incumbent censorships. Lack of distribution and maybe a ticklish subject matter or two that had kept his films on the island also hindered the world knowing what Japan had known—they had a great film-maker in their midst. One who'd been watching other countries' films with interest, reading other culture's writers, and began melding and refining and merging his own culture with them to create something new and richer, an alloyed kind of film that spoke across divides, across seas and oceans and spoke to everyone.

 

He'd already made great films. Few had seen them. Rashomon, however, was a film that was so good, that happenstance of availability fell by the way-side. 

 

Rashomon was actively sought out.

 

It was, evidently, enough for America's Academy of Motion Pictures to give it an "Honorary Oscar" (in 1952) for "most outstanding foreign language film" and, eventually, to create a category to recognize excellence in "foreign films." Maybe to avoid the competition.

"I don't understand. I just don't understand. I don't understand it at all." 

A woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), a commoner (Kichijirô Ueda), and a priest (Minoru Chiaki)—from Kiyomizu Temple—sit out a down-pour at the ruined Rashômon gatehouse. The newly-arrived commoner finds the woodcutter and the priest in a confused stupor over "a strange story," "a horrible story" that they've just heard at the courtyard garden. A story, the priest says that "may finally make me lose my faith in the human soul."

 

The woodcutter and the priest have just from court where they have testified in a trial against a thief, Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), accused of rape and murder.

 

The Testimony

The woodcutter explains how three days previously he was walking the road between Sekiyama and Yamashina, when he stumbled on a woman's hat in the bushes, a trampled samurai cap, some cut rope, an amulet case...and a dead body.  

 

The priest tells of how he encountered the victims, a samurai and his wife (Machiko Kyô and Masayuki Mori) on that fateful road the day of the crimes.

Tajômaru, the bandit, is up next. In the woodcutter's telling of the trial, he is bound but defiant, his testimony is filled with braggadocio and contains little that doesn't make him seem a formidable man. The bandit tells of seeing the samurai and his wife on the road, and lusting after the woman, lured the samurai away with the promise of selling ancient swords. He attacked the samurai and tied him to a tree-stump. Then, went to the wife and told her the samurai had taken sick and leads her to the forest to where she sees him tied up and helpless.  

 

Kurosawa then starts a sequence of shots that sets up the power-dynamic between the trio as they glance at each other, realizing and assessing the situation. Stylized, almost ritualized, if you ever wondered where Sergio Leone got his ideas for staging his climactic stand-offs, it's here. The sequence ends with the camera moving around the wife's head, as Leone circled Henry Fonda's in Once Upon a Time in the West.

The wife, seeing her husband bound and helpless, takes matters into her own hands and attacks the bandit with a knife, but he overpowers her and rapes her. The wife, in her grief and shame, begs the bandit to duel her husband for the events, saying that she will go with whoever wins the battle. The men fight a masterful duel "crossing swords 23 times" according to the bandit (according to the woodcutter), but in the end, the bandit wins the battle. The wife has run off. He takes the samurai's sword and leaves.

 

The priest concludes that men lie because they are weak.

The wife then testifies on the events (as related by the priest). She says that after the assault, the bandit left, and she freed her husband. She begs her husband for forgiveness, but he only looks at her contemptuously, blaming her for the assault. She then tells her husband to kill her and relieve her of the shame, but  the husband does not move, continuing staring at her. In her distress, the woman faints. When she recovers, he husband is dead, stabbed in the chest with her own knife. She flees the scene, attempts to drown herself, but fails.

The commoner hears all this and contemptuously says that women use tears to hide their lies.

The samurai's story is heard through a medium (inserting one more layer of narrative prejudice). The samurai says that, after the assault, the bandit offered to marry the wife, which she accepted, but only if the bandit killed her husband. This angers the bandit who drags the wife before the samurai and makes him an offer: release the wife or kill her. The wife runs off with the bandit pursuing her, but he loses her in the woods. He returns to the samurai, releases him and apologizes, leaving the samurai alone. The samurai, defeated, dishonored, kills himself with his wife's dagger.

 

But, the spirit-samurai makes the assertion that the dagger was taken from his chest, although he couldn't identify who.

Who is right? Who is telling the truth? There is no question that Tajômaru is guilty of the crimes of stealing and rape—but the murder? Did he kill the samurai? Did the wife? Was it suicide? Those are the practical questions in Rashomon, and, unfortunately for those looking for absolute truths, the testimony and evidence are not conclusive. We've seen (or heard) the witness testimony and they conflict, due to circumstance, emotion, trauma, societal rigors, and with the ramifications of what had happened.

The truth is, there is one more version of the story in Rashomon. One more interpretation of events. But, one can't even trust that. Ultimately, this is not a detective story that reveals the truth at the end (and Kurosawa did have a yen for detective stories). At its core, it is a tale about how enigmatic truth is. Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth may be sworn to in courts of law, but they are a nearly unattainable goal, especially couched in a story format. Stories, in and of themselves, are interpretive, hued by perspective, the version of events, and who is doing the telling. Court lawyers are masters of spinning the truth, shading it, undercutting it, sewing doubt.

But, there are no lawyers in Rashomon, just common people...and a priest, who is sustained more on faith than proof. So, when all is said...and done...we are still left questioning what we have seen, with no reckoning of justice (whatever that is) being done or of a resolution in the tenuous balance between good and bad. There's no moral here in this telling of the tale and it's no fable. Ultimately, Kurosawa presents the argument that no film, no picture...no art?...can be trusted for truth as it's all interpretive, all suggestive. And though movies and their makers may strive for verisimilitude, truth will be forever out of reach.

 

All we can ask for is the good intention, the kind act, the unselfish sacrifice, the question "Can I help?" even knowing that truth cannot be trusted in anyone else but ourselves...if we're being true to ourselves. It's like a ray of sunlight dappling through the canopy of a forest. All the better to see ourselves true.