RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) is one of those films you hear so much about that you feel you’ve seen it, though in my case I hadn’t. The name of the film has come to stand for a type of narrative where one gets different points of view on an event. But Rashomon tells a much more complex and interesting story than this and in a more sophisticated way. Sheltering from the storm a priest and a woodcutter talk about a trial they’d just witnessed. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) had apparently raped a woman (Machiko Kyō) and killed her husband (Masayuki Mori). We get four versions of this story, each correlating to an extent but differing in important and contradictory ways. They can’t all be true.  Each of the witnesses trying to present themselves as a version of their ideal self. But are they lying consciously? Or is each merely understanding from a different perspective? A combination? And each version is narrated in different ways, so for example the dead Samurai’s story is told by the ghost of the Samurai via a medium as told by a woodcutter. Moreover, watching I was struck by the significance of the woman’s story being a rape – it could have been some other crime — and the way we’re getting a mid-twentieth century Japanese cultural attitudes on an event set in the past but understood from a present perspective where these events resonate in similar but different ways (‘The woman’s story is not to be believed’, says one of the witnesses in the trial). The film begins with the phrase ‘I don’t understand’. At the end the film acknowledges that the full truth can never be known, that ‘objective’ truth doesn’t exist, and yet one of the characters at the beginning says that if people don’t tell the truth life is impossible and we’re mere animals. But of course even telling ‘the truth’ is no guarantee that things happened as told. It’s a film that packs a lot in a short time – at 88 minutes it’s the shortest Kurosawa film I’ve seen —  and poetically: the rain, the light effects with a camera pointed at the sun, that poetic scene just before the rape where the woman’s mysterious beauty and the bandit’s sexual desire are so powerfully evoked, the bandit under a tree, face and body dappled by sunlight, waking up feeling he has a right to everything he can take.

I wonder how the film would play with students today, this meditation on truth relayed over the body of a woman raped, and raped again in each telling with her body available to whomever has the force to take it, her word discounted, being blamed for what happened to her, and in one version, with the husband disowning her from what he could not protect her from. The significance of the crime being a rape is more significant in my viewing than it had come across when I perhaps too glancingly read about the film in years gone by.

To perhaps restate the obvious, a film to see: much more interesting and complex, better, than the most laudatory hearsay would have it.

José Arroyo