“RASHOMON” MOVIE REVIEW

 

“RASHOMON”

 

MOVIE REVIEW

 

Rashomon is directed by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and stars Machiko Kiyo, Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune, and Takashi Shimura. 71 years ago, Rashomon was the film that broke Akira Kurosawa and wider Japanese cinema into the West. Its screening may have been one of the defining moments in the history of world cinema, as the post-war world gradually began to reconnect with itself. Of course, Kurosawa was a respected director by this point, and Japanese cinema itself had a serious legacy: it's debatable how much Rashomon would have changed without its influence. It is more certain that it is a masterpiece.

Rashomon still feels like a staple of cinematic inspiration and cinematic artistry, and its influence can be directly traced to countless directors around the world. At his peak, Kurosawa understood all the moving parts of a film, sound, lighting, subject, movement, and actor, and distilled them into something elemental, taking complexity and making it very simple.

The opening scenes of Kurosawa's Earthly Poem are suggestive of three solitary figures huddled in a rainstorm across a desolate entrance. The cut from this utterly miserable scene to the sun poking through the windswept trees is one of the best editing choices ever committed to film, summing up all the contradictions and singular cracks at Rashomon's core.

Rashomon's setting, crucial to eternal magic, repeats the same story several times: the bandit Tajomaru, played by Toshiro Mifune, murders the samurai Takehiro, played by Masayuki Mori, and rapes his wife, Masako, played by Machiko Kyo. As each character in the forest retells the story, we lose track of what is true and what is false, changing and rewriting our understanding of what happened before.

Thus, Tajomaru's story is presented as an adventure, with an action scene full of courage and skill as the central conflict between him and the samurai; Masako's story is tragic and emotionally climactic, befitting the core trauma of her experience; Takehiro's interpretation is that when spoken through a medium, emotions are held back, symbols of honor and duty, surpassing any romantic expression of love. We soon learn that each story is more concerned with confirming its stars as heroes or victims than with a more mundane and disturbing truth.

All of this is told in flashback to two of the three men in the dilapidated building where the film opens, acting only as neutral witnesses in the investigation, at the center of which these three isolated and disparate men could not resist the murder.  Get a better understanding of each person's motivations or the underlying rationale behind their storytelling.

With each change of setting and perspective, Kurosawa subtly rearranges the formal rules. While one is the reflective expression, the other is action-packed. Although one is more realistic, the other is phantasmagoric, but the setting and characters do not change. Incredulity, selfishness, and deceit are Rashomon's core personality traits, inextricably linked to the human condition, which Kurosawa undoubtedly understood and sought to create in one of his many masterpieces.

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