RASHOMON Movie Review
In the Woods
It's happened to you. You've gone to a movie with someone, either loved or hated what you saw on the screen, and as you leave the theatre together, you realize that you've each had the exact opposite response. Then one of you pops the inevitable, rhetorical question: “Did we see the same movie?” The answer, of course, is no. You both looked at the same movie, but what you saw is another story. In describing what we see to each other—and not just our response to what we see—we possess the power to distort and rework some very simple truths to suit our own purposes. That uncomfortable fact is the subject of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, which not only introduced the Japanese cinema to much of the world, it also introduced a new expression into the language. The film's title actually refers to the huge stone gate under which three men take refuge from a rainstorm in 11th-century Japan, and whose talk soon turns to a notorious crime—a rape and murder—and the resulting trial that took place. Since all the varying versions of the crime that the men describe and that we see enacted in the film (a fourth is related by a spirit) conflict with each other, the unfolding labyrinthine mystery soon encompasses not just the crime itself, but the motives of those describing it. Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo are remarkable as the criminal and his prey in this ingeniously assembled and endlessly fascinating portrait of human greed and fallibility. Rashomon took the film world by storm on its release in 1950, winning the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
NEXT STOP … Ikiru, Citizen Kane, The Conversation
1951 83m/B JP Machiko Kyo, Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki, Kichijiro Ueda, Daisuke Kato; D: Akira Kurosawa; W: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto; C: Kazuo Miyagawa; M: Fumio Hayasaka. Academy Awards ‘51: Best Foreign Film; National Board of Review Awards ‘51: Best Director (Kurosawa); Venice Film Festival ‘51: Best Film; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘52: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (B&W). VHS, LV CRC, NLC