Akira Kurosawa (1950)
My mind was on events elsewhere in London (SW19) when I saw Rashomon at BFI but I think I can see that it is a classic and, at eighty-three minutes, it’s a mercifully short one (though it didn’t feel that way the other evening). Thanks to a review of the film by Simon Harcourt-Smith in the July 1952 Sight and Sound, used as the BFI programme note, I may also now understand why I can’t get on with action sequences in Kurosawa – (or indeed with the style of acting in many Japanese screen dramas considered to be, unlike this one, ‘realistic’). Harcourt-Smith writes, of the ‘central story’ in Rashomon:
‘… here is an episode in which the Japanese popular-heroic theatre, the ‘Kabuki’, habitually delights. In almost all ‘Kabuki’ stories we find a duel, where the contestants, hissing and agile as cats, leap and spring about each other with an acrobacy that never becomes ridiculous or ceases to excite. In Rashomon we find just such a duel. And though we see it in two different versions, so admirably photographed and played is it, we are not for a moment fatigued by repetition. Repetition is indeed a salient quality of the ‘Kabuki’ theatre. The pieces generally played are long, gestures are stereotyped, events move round and round to the same point. …’
You said it. The claimed resemblance of the contestants to cats (which I don’t see) isn’t enough to stop me from finding this kind of routine all the things that Harcourt-Smith assures us it isn’t. It is ridiculous, never starts to excite, fatigues by repetition. Because I’m most comfortable, in novels and movies, with dramatic realism, I find the extended or repeated illustration of a single event or emotion problematic in opera or (to a lesser extent) ballet on stage. On screen, it’s infuriating: once a point has been made and understood, I want the director to move on.
Set in medieval Japan, Rashomon describes the rape of a woman and the killing of her samurai husband in the accounts of four witnesses of these events. Each witness has a different story to tell so that Rashomon is famously regarded as a paradigm of the elusiveness of incontrovertible ‘truth’ in what an author presents to their audience or readers. This is easy enough to understand, and interesting, although I was bit surprised to see from Pauline Kael’s note on the film that the first three witnesses – a bandit who comes upon the couple in a grove, the wife and the dead man (speaking through a medium) – ‘giv[es] an account that increases the prestige of his conduct’. I thought rather that the first and second testimonies, in common with the fourth and final one – from a woodcutter, who we know from an early stage finds the dead body and, it eventually transpires, witnessed the events that led to the killing – were more remarkable for the fact that each claimed a greater degree of responsibility for the rape and murder. The woodcutter’s story also seems to pull in elements of the other accounts: the husband’s rejection of his wife, defiled because she has been raped; the two men fighting over her. As well as being longer than the earlier witness statements, it’s more emotionally tortuous (for example, the bandit is revealed to be a less straightforward character than you’d thought). Perhaps if viewers read the film in different ways, we’re reinforcing the truth of Kurosawa’s central theme in Rashomon.
The film’s centre is undoubtedly gripping, although it’s bracketed by a beginning and end that are less satisfactory. In the prologue – as the woodcutter, a priest and a servant take shelter from relentless, pouring rain at a deserted gatehouse (with a hanging sign hanging that reads ‘Rashomon’) – the priest tells the servant that the story that’s about to be told is the worst thing he’s ever known to happen, worse than fires or wars and so on. What happened in the grove doesn’t, on anyone’s account, really justify this build-up, even though the priest’s hype and the apocalyptic tone and atmosphere of the introduction certainly draw you in. Kurosawa punctuates the various narratives by cutting back to the trio in the rain, who debate the moral significance of what happened. Because the competing arguments put forward by the three men seem designed to convince at a purely intellectual level none of them is fully persuasive. Even so, the servant seems to have more evidence than the other two to support his world view – selfishly misanthropic, cheerfully nihilistic. After all the stories have been told, the three men hear a baby crying and the priest agrees that the woodcutter should take care of it, since he’s restored the priest’s faith in humanity. The rain stops and the baby stops crying. The impact of the silence (the baby has an amazing pair of lungs) is great but not great enough to stop you feeling that this concluding optimism is artificial.
The most compelling sequence for me was the whirling, disorienting routine of the medium, played by Fumiko Honma with androgynous brio. Each of the bandit, husband and wife has a penchant for maniacal laughter – the wife was the clear winner in this category and I did find the actress who played her, Machiko Kye, remarkable as she transformed herself from almost a child to a woman to a banshee. In the role of the bandit, Toshiro Mifune’s vigour is exhausting but effective. Masayuki Mori is the samurai; Takashi Shimura the woodcutter; Minoru Chiaki the priest; Kichijiro Ueda the servant. The cinematography is by Kazuo Miyagawa; the music, which incorporates bits of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, by Fumio Hayasaka. Kurosawa himself was the editor and shared the screenplay credit with Shinobu Hashimoto. The source material is two stories, Rashomon and In a Grove, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
30 June 2010
