Rashomon

A film like "Rashomon" has become like comfort food to me, it is a film I watch when I want to be told a story, and it keeps my interst from beginning to end. "Rashomon" is a great story about one isolated incident, it's compact in its nature, and classical in its period, you feel it will be a story with a very traditional structure but that's when the wool is pulled from under you. "Rashomon" took leaps and bounds from past films by telling the same story through different points of view. In a way each scenario is true, and each one is false, but as one character points out in the film "I don't care if it's a lie, as long as it's entertaining."

The scenario in question has to do with the interaction between a samurai, his wife, and a bandit in the forest. The samurai is killed, but each person involved gives a different testimony at the trial as to what really happened. The film begins after the trial with a woodsman who, as the only witness to the death gives his own account, and a priest contemplate over what has transpired. After being joined by a drifter, they reveal to him the different testimonies of each person.

We see the scenario take place through flashbacks, first it is by the bandit's point of view as we see him kill the husband with cocky bravado after he rapes the wife. The wife's story is set up differently; her account shows the bandit leaves after she is raped, and after seeing her husband's look of shame, she seems to be overtaken by an uncontorllable urge and she kills him. The husband is able to tell his version through the possession of a medium, he is the one who ends up killing himself after seeing the wife wanting to leave him for the bandit. The woodsman's story is told last, as it bring about elements of all three previous stories together, but even his honesty is questioned after he is caught in an earlier lie about not actually witnessing the murder.

Since "Rashomon", we have seen films done through various points of view before, so much so it's almost become cliche. American films have adopted this technique for genre films mostly in the mystery/suspense mode, but unlike "Rashomon", they come out with a logical conclusion that can be thought of as "the truth". "Rashomon" keeps its real truth uncertain, it's an allegory about the dark side of human nature, how the truth can become clouded through our natural sense of embelleshing it. How can we know what is true and what is a lie in a world full of lies? How can we trust people when we are all prone to lie in order to protect ourselves?

The ending of the film offers an optimistic outcome, with the priest and the woodsman, as their faith in humanity is re established by a small act of kindness, yet we are still left with some of these uncertain questions.

When I first saw "Rashomon", I probably didn't fully understand what the film was all about. I was about fourteen years old and arthouse cinema was still new to me. "Rashomon" was among the first foreign films I did see along with "The 400 Blows", and "8 and a half", and it had a tremendous impact on my life even then. For me it was an opening up to a whole new culture, and a new form of storytelling. It was directed by Akira Kurosawa who has proven himself to me to be one of the master storytellers of cinema. "Rashomon" was a stepping stone for Kurosawa winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival which helped usher in arthouse cinema to popular culture.

Seeing "Rashomon" today is like looking at the definition of what a great movie should be, it's multi-faceted, commenting on human nature, and understands the use of storytelling. I can sense myself ease into its world, and feel its grasp on me, that's when I know I'm sucked in. It seems quiet and meditative at points, at others it's full of heightened drama and suspense, a woven tapestry of feelings and emotion.

I couln't help but think, as moviegoers, we naturally crave being told a good story, with "Rashomon", we have the same story told to us four times and it remains enthralling, and it looks so simple, so effortless, I can see how some people may think we have lost this in films being made today. Rashomon makes a simple thing like changing the point of view of a story seem like magic, as if it was by a flick of the wrist, how quickly everything changes, and how it could make a whole new world open up for you.