Film Review: Rashomon [1950]

My first dabble with Kurosawa is with his breakout film, Rashomon, the one that put him on the map after winning The Gold Lion in Venice back in 1951. Most people first come across Kurosawa through his most well known film, Seven Samurai from the late 50's but I'm at a hotel room in New York with about two hours to kill so I don't really have time for three and a half hours of samurai action.

Rashomon is a jidaigeki, crime and mystery story (jidaigeki refers to a japanese story taking place in the Edo era of japanese history which is set between 1603 and 1868) which tells the tale of three men discussing a recent murder and the testimonies surrounding it. A man has been murdered but the suspected murderer, the wife of the man, and the man himself (speaking through a medium) all tell different stories of what took place during that fateful day.

I'll have to admit I first watched fifteen minutes of the film only to turn it off to do something else since the different narratives and lack of leads during the films opening left me disinterested and detached from the story, but this time I stuck it through.

I won't say that Rashomon blew me away or made me incredibly eager to watch the rest of Kurosawa's films. I still feel that Kurosawa might not be the director for me even if I am able to appreciate his different strong suits which I found to be quite apparent in this film.

First, there's the "lead", Toshiro Mifune, who came to be a long-time collaborator with Kurosawa and who's one of Rashomon's strongest suits. He portrays the devious bandit Tajomaru but he displays him with charisma and a cunning intelligence. From his out-of-breath body movements during the fighting scenes, to the spontaneous slapping of insects during his introduction, Mifune breathes life into a film with stale characters, becoming the only one who seems viivd and real in a world where the others seem robotic and scripted. Despite staying out of tune with the rest of the ensemble, Mifune never seems overplayed and always stays true to a certain acting-norm of the time.

While Rashomon is a solid film, it doesn't quite reach the levels I was hoping for it do. Maybe the fault mainly lies with me hoping for richer character drama while watching a film about a crime mystery but I can't help but feel slightly disinterested in Rashomon throughout the film. The different narratives makes me unable to fully immerse myself in the film and the jumps between characters telling other characters stories gives for a couple of quite harsh cuts that fuck with the flow of the film. It's not hard to appreciate Rashomon for what it is, there are a couple of beautiful shots aswell as several intriguing scenes but down the line, this just doesn't feel like a film for me and the issue I have with films set in similar time frames in Western society seems to transfer over to jidaigeki aswell. I truly hope this isn't the case and that I'll be able to enjoy Kurosawa just as much as other people seem to do. I feel that either Seven Samurai or Ikiru might be better at winning me over.

Rashomon [1950]
dir. A. Kurosawa
7
Anton Öberg Sysojev