Rashômon

Director	Akira Kurosawa
Cast	Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Takashi Shimura
Released	25th Aug, 1950 (Japan)
	26th Dec, 1951 (USA)
My Rating	4.0

A woman is raped, her husband killed. A woodcutter finds the body and a bandit is arrested. Next we have four perspectives of the murder: the wife's, her dead samurai husband's through a medium, the rapist bandit's, and the woodcutter's. The four versions are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer in the end to determine, which of them, if any, is the truth.

The four stories are flashbacks within flashbacks, as told by the woodcutter and a priest (who had seen the couple a couple of days before the crimes) to a commoner, all three of whom happen to be stuck at the Rashômon Gate in a heavy downpour. The narrative style of different perspectives to the same event is adopted by an extensive variety of future films, such as the IMDB# 21 The Usual Suspects, Vantage Point, Courage Under Fire, and closer home, Kamal Haasan's Virumaandi (Tamil).

The mysterious piece of work is considered one of Kurosawa's masterpieces, and simplicity is its biggest feature. The black and white movie is shot at just three sets: the woods where the rape and the murder occur, the supposed court where the all those involved testify, and the Rashômon Gate. Brilliant use of mottled light is made in the woods through tree-leaves, adding to the ambiguity. The cinematography and the background score capture the mood of the movie quite effectively. The epilogue where the commoner flees away with the kimono off the crying baby who has been abandoned by its parents at the gate, and when opposed by the woodcutter and the priest, depicts the changing world then, where every man is selfish. Kurosowa mentions in his autobiography that Rashômon is a reflection of life, and life does not have clear meanings.


The cast contains only eight people, and I felt everyone did their job well. Toshirô Mifune portrays the savage look of an animal as the bandit Tajômaru. The only overdone part was the crazy laughs, the bandit's barbaric and the rape victim's hysteric. The laughs appeared forced and artificial to the point of irritation.

The movie had quite an influence in many aspects, including film-making inside and outside Japan. It also has an effect named after it in psychology, the Rashomon effect: the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it.

Kurosawa was conferred with the Academy Honorary Award in 1990, two years before Satyajit Ray was awarded the same Oscar.

Recipient of high critical acclamation, this movie is supposed to have brought Japanese cinema to the rest of the world. I've seen a few foreign-language-films (French, German, Italian, and Dari), but this marks as the first Japanese movie I watched. It would be inappropriate to consider this sixty years old movie as a representation of Japanese cinema. However, there are quite some similarities with Indian movies of that era, not only in presentation but also in content, the way certain things (read sex) were taboo to be talked about in any form, even on screen, unlike Hollywood. Somewhat gloomy, thought-provoking, ambiguous, freaky, Rashômon was quite a refreshing change from the usual stuff.