One of legendary director Akira Kurosawa's most acclaimed films, Rashomon features an innovative narrative structure, brilliant acting, and a thoughtful exploration of reality versus perception.
One of legendary director Akira Kurosawa's most acclaimed films, Rashomon features an innovative narrative structure, brilliant acting, and a thoughtful exploration of reality versus perception.
This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial unfolds, the participants in the crime -- the bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the rape victim (Machiko Kyo), and the murdered man (Masayuki Mori) -- tell their
plausible though completely incompatible versions of the story. In the bandit's version, he and the man wage a spirited duel after the rape, resulting in the man's death. In the woman's testimony, she is spurned by her husband after being raped. Hysterical with grief, she kills him. In the man's version, speaking through the lips of a medium, the bandit beseeches the woman after the rape to go away with him. She insists that the bandit kill her husband first, which angers the bandit. He spurns her and leaves. The man kills himself. Seized with guilt, the woodcutter admits to the shocked priest and the commoner that he too witnessed the crime. His version is equally feasible, although his veracity is questioned when it is revealed that he stole a dagger from the crime scene. Just as all seems bleak and hopeless, a baby appears behind the gate. The commoner seizes the moment and steals the child's clothes, while the woodcutter redeems himself and humanity in the eyes of the troubled priest, by adopting the infant. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
What Akira Kurosawa and his tiny production team wrought is now an accepted maxim of modern life, a creed by which to live in a world where everyone has a blog and an opinion.
Rashomon is a novel, stimulating moviegoing experience, and a sure sign that U.S. film importers will be looking hard at Japanese pictures from now on.
With fast tracking shots, b&w chiaroscuro camerawork and a pessimistic intimation that what exactly was done is not essential, the result hit the bull's-eye with foreign filmgoers and critics.
The film, a 1950 landmark exploration of the confoundingly elusive nature of truth, received an Academy Award at a time when the prize for foreign-language film did not exist.
Innovative, experimental and brilliantly constrcuted, Rashomon is one of world cinema's truly great works, questioning the notions of truth and morality with its multiple perspective, a film that put Kurosawa and Japanese cinema on the international map
Beautifully shot.
Great premise/story.
I can appreciate why this film is held in such high esteem...but it felt a little convoluted to me, to spite it's fairly short running time.
May 12, 2008
Robert C
Super Reviewer
'Rashomon'. A landmark film by Kurosawa in his clever telling of a story from four contradictory, but very plausible perspectives, exploring honesty, honour and the goodness of man.
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