Despite vast sums being spent by Hollywood on advertising, films of old used to have a much bigger social impact than today. At least this is the impression a linguist might get from Rashomon, the 1950 drama directed by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Apparently, this film was very popular in the former Yugoslavia and its name became a new word in (Serbo)Croatian vocabulary, often used for situations when various parties give different accounts of a similar event. The linguistic influence of Rashomon didn’t end there. From the 1950s, the word "rašomonac" ("ra-sho-mo-natz") was used for voyeurs in Belgrade slang. This linguistic impact is even more fascinating when we remember that Rashomon was the first of Kurosawa’s (and, for that matter, Japanese) films to reach a Western audience and as such it predated his later, more popular works like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.
The plot of the film is based on short stories by the famous Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The story is set in medieval Japan and begins in the ruins of the Rashomon gate where a priest (played by Minoru Chiaki), a commoner (played by Kichijiro Ueda) and a woodcutter (played by Takashi Shimura) take shelter from the pouring rain. In order to pass the time, the woodcutter and priest start telling the story of the strange events they have witnessed. A local bandit, Tajomaru (played by Toshiro Mifune), apparently killed a noble, Takehiro (played by Masayuki Mori), and raped his beautiful wife Masako (played by Machiko Kyo). Tajomaru is later apprehended and tried but the incident is never explained because all participants – Tajomaru, Masako and Takehiro’s soul, summoned through a medium (played by Fumiko Honma) – offer different accounts. The woodcutter witnessed those events and his account differs from the other three.
Rashomon is often referenced as one of the most important and influential films in the history of cinema. This is due to Shinobu Hashimoto’s and Kurosawa’s script being based around the philosophical concept of humanity’s inability to grasp objective truth, which is always, willingly or accidentally, blurred by emotions or different perceptions. Kurosawa built the whole film on this concept and used the medium of filmmaking to introduce a new, revolutionary technique of storytelling. Instead of describing the event in a straightforward fashion, Kurosawa uses four different perspectives and tells the same story four times. But the result is anything but monotonous or boring, because those different perspectives enrich the same simple story and make those four interpretations radically different from each other, leaving the audience with the thankless task of discovering which of them is correct. Seeing the small but significant differences in those versions is a marvel to watch.
Yet, for Kurosawa it represented a whole new challenge. The tone of each version had to be different, the musical score had to be different and, last but not least, the actors playing the principal characters had to play not one but four different roles. Kurosawa was lucky to have a small but very talented band of actors at his disposal. Toshiro Mifune, the best known of them, is somewhat disappointing here. His role of a small-time psychopathic criminal is played in a style that might look too theatrical by our standards. Masayuki Mori, on the other hand, looks almost wooden in comparison, but thankfully Machiko Kyo improves the general impression with four variants of her character. The best role is reserved for Takashi Shimura, who plays a supporting character, very different from the noble warrior he would play in Seven Samurai. Thanks to good actors, Kurosawa managed to make all those four versions sufficiently different and intriguing enough even for a modern-day audience, more accustomed to storytelling experiments in filmmaking.
But Rashomon is nevertheless a film that shows its age, and its impact might not be as powerful as it was in the early 1950s. First of all, the musical soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka is sometimes irritating (especially in segments accompanying Masako’s tale; they sound very much like Ravel’s "Boléro"). The film has problems with pacing – some scenes are simply overlong, especially the one showing the woodcutter walking in the forest before discovering the corpse, and as a result, Rashomon feels much longer than its 88 minutes might indicate. Finally, Kurosawa tries to lighten the generally depressive tone of the film by introducing an abandoned baby in the temple at the end and thus allowing the characters to portray the general goodness of human beings, despite all of the film’s events showing the opposite.
However, despite all of those flaws, Rashomon still presents us with a great cinematic talent at work, and its place in film history is well justified, as is its imprint on various nations’ vocabularies.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on January 23rd 2002)
==
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/ Cent profile https://beta.cent.co/@drax Minds profile https://www.minds.com/drax_rp_nc
Brave browser: https://brave.com/dra011
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/548-rash-mon?language=en-US
Critic: AAA
