BUY DVD

In the eleventh century, Rashomon was the name of the great south gate of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It is also the name of one of two short stories by turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (both reprinted in the superb booklet included with this DVD), from which this famous film was adapted. (It is actually the second story, "In A Grove," which supplies Rashomon's plot, and the first, its title and setting.)

In the short story "Rashomon," the ruined city gate is a hellish spot, where thieves and outcasts gather and unclaimed corpses are left to rot (and be vandalized). In the movie, Rashomon Gate retains this same hellishness, although there is also something about it reminiscent of a fallen temple. Within the shelter of the Gate, three men—a Buddhist priest, a woodcutter, and a commoner—gather to weather a rainstorm. The commoner, whose arrival launches the story, interrupts a heated conversation between the other two men. Both have just witnessed a criminal trial which has left them shaken. Indeed, the priest is so distraught he fears he may lose his faith.

Curious, the cynical commoner asks what has so disturbed them. Thus begins a recounting of the trial testimony, in which a rape and murder are described three times by three different eyewitnesses—the rapist and putative murderer, a brigand named Tajomaru (Toshiró Mifune); the victim of the rape and wife of the murdered man, a noblewoman named Masako (Machiko Kyó); and the dead man himself, a samurai named Takehiro (Masayuki Mori), who speaks from beyond the grave after his spirit is summoned by an eerie medium. (There will be a fourth eyewitness, who hasn't testified to all he's seen at the trial, and that is the woodcutter himself.)

Though the key events in each of the retellings remain the same—the violation of the woman and the death of the samurai—circumstances, motives, and meanings change drastically with each teller.

In the brigand's heroic version, after raping the woman he frees the samurai, whom he has tied to a tree stump, so he may revenge his wife's disgrace. They cross swords in a fair fight, and the samurai is killed.

In the wife's pathetic version, the brigand simply abandons her after the rape. Guilt-ridden for not dying in defense of her honor, she begs her husband for mercy—or death. But the samurai only stares at her in contemptuous silence. Driven to despair, she herself kills her husband with the dagger she meant for him to use on her, then tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to kill herself.

In the husband's tragic version, after the rape, his wife shrilly commands the brigand to kill her husband—the sole witness to her dishonor—then make her his wife. Disgusted by the woman's cruelty, the brigand offers to kill the wife for the samurai, but she escapes. The thief then frees the samurai and leaves him alone with his shame. Overwhelmed by betrayal and loss of face, he commits seppuku with his wife's dagger.

In the woodcutter's black-comic version, no one acts with a shred of dignity. The woman is hysterically vengeful—not caring who lives or dies, so long as someone pays for her dishonor; the two men are cowards; their sword fight is a burlesque, in which each runs away from the other; and the samurai is killed by chance, when he slips and the brigand seizes the moment to spear him with a thrown sword.

Although Rashomon is so famously about the subjectivity of truth that it has become a synonym for the idea, it is less famously and obviously about the nature of truth-telling. What appalls the idealistic priest, disgusts the decent woodcutter, and simply confirms the commoner's cynical view of human nature aren't merely the lies that men tell themselves and each other, but the vanity of those lies. In Rashomon, even beyond the grave, all is vanity—and a chasing after wind.

Ironically, the movie itself is an illustration of this, for it was director Akira Kurosowa's vanity (he feared his story was too dark) that caused him to tack on an "upbeat" ending—not in either of Ryunosuke's stories—in which the woodcutter rescues an abandoned infant, and thereby restores the possibility of a selfless human act. Everything else in Rashomon belies this sentimentality. Indeed, everything else in the movie is what makes Rashomon so disturbing, and so great.

A word—actually several thousand—needs to be said about Kurosawa's direction and editing, Shinobu Hashimoto's script (co-authored by Kurosawa), Kazuo Miyagawa's incomparable black-and-white cinematography, So Matsuyama's sets, and H. Motsumoto's art direction. The famous opening scenes in the rain and ruin of the Gate, with water spilling from all the eaves and angles, the woodcutter's amazing silent journey into the sun-dappled woods (for as in a fairy tale, the story takes place in the heart of a forest), the pre-Raphaelite exquisiteness of the shots of Masako as she passes Tajomaru on horseback or wets her hand in a forest pond…all of the imagery constantly acts out Rashomon's themes—its unfathomable mixture of darkness and light, reality and romance, vanity and…whatever else there is.

Criterion's transfer of this masterwork is the best I've seen. While there are a few visible flaws in the negative, overall contrast and tone are so good that these don't matter. Buy this disc.

- Jonathan Valin