"Rashomon" is an institution, not just a unique film for its time. Its title is part of the lexicon, though I rarely hear it nowadays. I would call it one of Akira Kurosawa's greatest films as it stirs the soul and is remarkably provocative. It establishes a murder with motive but we are never sure how it really occurred. We hear eyewitness accounts and those who participated in the murder, yet can we trust the eyewitnesses or the participants?
The presumed first eyewitness is the sorrowful woodcutter. He walks through the woods with an axe and finds a dead body. The woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) runs away to find the police and gives his testimony to the court. There is a slight problem: his account of what occurred varies from what he tells the court versus his admission to a commoner. Was it a sword that was thrust into a samurai's chest or was it a dagger with the pearl inlay? The rough, tough, maniacal bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune) claims to have killed the samurai, but did he? And what of the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyō)? Under a trance where her dead husband's spirit is summoned, the claim changes to suicide and the samurai used a priceless dagger to kill himself. The samurai, Kanazawa (Masayuki Mori), couldn't live with his wife's virtue taken by the bandit so he offed himself. Is this a reliable version of events? Is any version reliable in terms of how the rape and murder occurred? We know with certainty that the wife left the bandit and her husband, and we know the samurai is dead.
Who is telling the truth of such a bizarre incident? I can't say which is the most truthful account yet one wonders why the woodcutter suddenly confesses to the monk and the commoner that he witnessed the actual murder! There's the issue of the missing dagger and writer-director Akira Kurosawa starts cleverly building the narrative to include multiple versions told from multiple people yet the incident never occurs the same way. It is a fascinating, complex structure that incorporates the time-honored literary tradition of flashbacks within flashbacks. We start piecing it together and realize that detailed truths are evasive - the murder is real but the telling is all fabrication and contradiction.
"Rashomon" is based on a 1922 Japanese short story titled "In a Grove" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and it deals with similar themes but the most telling is unreliability. As it reaches a riveting conclusion involving the monk, the commoner and the woodcutter's raging discussions on truth and selfishness (they are in the present time structure discussing this most horrific crime), "Rashomon" touches us with hope that shoulders on its ambiguities. There are also shades of honesty, most tellingly Kanazawa's wife who says, "To have my shame known by two men is worse than dying." Not disclosing her shame and asking two men to fight to the death with the sole survivor remaining with her is indicative of her making sure the event unfolds her way. Exemplary vital cinema, and one of the few films that truly challenges the idea of truth.
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