Title: Rashomon
Rating: 5 Stars
Although I haven’t seen many of his films, I always enjoy Akira Kurosawa’s films. Being a Shakespeare fanboy, I enjoyed Ran, which is based on King Lear, and Throne of Blood, which is based on Macbeth. It’s interesting how the Shakespearean tragedy of kings translate to samurai times. Given the heavily emotive style of Kurosawa films, they lend themselves to Shakespeare very well.
In the 1950s, Kurosawa made a couple of films that had a huge impact upon Westerns. I’m talking about Yojimbo and Seven Samurai. Yojimbo led directly to films like A Fistful of Dollars. In fact, A Fistful of Dollars was so close to Yojimbo that the American release of the Spaghetti Western was held up over copyright issues. It spawned the genre of Westerns where a nameless gunslinger comes into a crime ridden town and proceeds to clean it up. In fact, as in the case of Yojimbo, it cleans it up so much that the town is effectively destroyed (to quote that WWII soldier looking at the ruins of St Lo in France, “we sure liberated the hell out of this place”). Although destroyed, it has also been cleansed so it can now rebuild itself better. As always, cultural transference isn’t just one way. Yojimbo itself is loosely based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Blood Harvest, which has an unnamed Continental Op private detective come in and take on two dueling gangs that are destroying a town.
Seven Samurai, as probably can be guessed, was the direct inspiration for The Magnificent Seven and it kicked off the whole genre of a group of sketchy malcontents getting together to take on some gang terrorizing innocent townspeople.
And then there’s Rashomon. It was made in 1950. In fact, crazy enough, filming started on July 7th and it premiered on August 25th. Keep in mind that this was just five years after a ruined Japan surrendered to end WWII. Kurosawa was operating under strict US censorship. Pretty much by definition, all Japanese films made in this period were pretty low budget affairs.
It tells the story of the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband. It’s told from four different perspectives: the bandit that set upon the couple, the wife, the spirit of the dead husband, and the wood chopper, the supposedly neutral party that quietly witnessed the crime.
The four stories vary widely. The bandit (Tajomaru, played by Toshiro Mifune), seemingly more than just slightly mad, admits tying up the samurai and then raping his wife. The samurai’s wife, now smitten with the bandit, asks Tajomaru to untie her husband so that the two men can fight to the death over her. She will willingly go with the winner. Now in love with the wife, he agrees. Tajomaru and the samurai bravely and skillfully sword fight until Tajomaru gets the upper hand and kills the samurai. He looks for her, but the wife has run off.
In the second version, the wife, nearly mad with remorse and shame, tells her story. After her samurai husband has been tied up, she bitterly fights off Tajomaru until he finally overwhelms her. Tajomaru then leaves. The wife crawls to her husband to beg for forgiveness for the shame she has brought upon herself and to kill her. Her husband just looks upon her with cold contempt. Holding the dagger, she blacks out from her shame and when she comes to, the dagger is in her husband’s chest. She later tries and fails to kill herself.
In a truly freaky part of the film, the husband’s spirit, through a medium, tells his story. He is tied up. Tajomaru rapes his wife. Tajomaru asks the wife to run off with him. She agrees but asks Tajomaru to first kill her husband. Shocked at the request, Tajomaru drags the wife to the samurai and asks if Tajomaru should kill the wife, thus gaining the samurai’s respect (?!). The wife runs away. Tajomaru frees the samurai. The samurai then kills himself.
After all of these versions are told, the wood chopper admits that he saw the whole thing but didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t want to get involved. The samurai is tied up. Tajomaru rapes the wife. Tajomaru asks to marry the wife. Instead, the wife frees the samurai and tells him to avenge her shame by killing Tajomaru. The samurai says, nah, I’m good. The wife screams at both of them, accusing them both of being bed wetting momma’s boys. The two reluctantly begin to fight. Unlike the Tajomaru version, this fight is anything but skillful or heroic. Both of them, shaking in fight, make half hearted attempts at sword play. Every time their swords even get close to contact they run away from the other. They screech in fear. They continually trip over their own feet. It’s actually quite comical. Finally Tajomaru gets the upper hand, and by pretty much closing his eyes and letting his sword fly, he kills the samurai.
Well, that’s it, right? The wood chopper story, the only version told by an impartial observer, must be the correct one, right? Well, it turns out that in all of this madness, the wife had a very expensive dagger that is now mysteriously missing. By his guilty look when accused, it’s clear that the wood chopper has stolen it. If he left out the fact that he stole the dagger, what else did he leave out?
There’s so much to enjoy. I loved the open ended nature of the film. There is no reliable narrator. What is the truth? Is there one truth? In each version, the narrator shaded the story for their own benefit. Are the narrators lying? Or does each narrator believe the truth of their own story? This is a film that will leave you thinking about it days after you watch it.
The acting is, as always in Kurosawa films, intense. I know that I’ve said this before about other novels and films, but the emotions are of operatic intensity. This is especially true of Mifune. Kurosawa and Mifune paired together in many films. In fact, he starred in all of the films that I listed above except for the much later Ran. Mifune is the Brando of Japanese cinema. He brings an intensity, charisma, and sexual energy that would seem completely at home in a film like A Streetcar Named Desire.
The drama, tragedy, and comedy work well together. Kurosawa choreographing both a skillfully fought sword fight and a comically inept one is pretty awesome.
To make such a film under such trying circumstances as post war Japan is an amazing achievement.
dorkenstein 