A Very Kurosawa Christmas: Rashomon (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 1h38m, 1950).

Akira Kurosawa's influence persists in cinema. His cinematography, and mastery of the samurai film can be seen re-contextualised everywhere from Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy-the first of which remakes Yojimbo (1961) against the background of the Old West and The Magnificent Seven (one of dozens of remakes of Seven Samurai (1954)) to Star Wars (1977)-essentially remaking Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress in space as a science fiction film. This not to mention homages that range from the anime Samurai 7 (2004) and A Bug's Life (1998) to Roger Corman's cheapo Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and the popular Ghost of Tsushima video game (2020). With the possible exception of next week's review Seven Samurai, no Kurosawa film has been more influential on cinema, and in particularly in the way that cinema constructs its narratives, as Rashomon, Kurosawa's 1950 adaption of the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa novella, in which three strangers recount-and retell-the story of a samurai, his wife, a bandit, and a murder.

The year is 1951, and alongside Gene Kelly, Akira Kurosawa is receiving an Academy Honourary Award. He will have to add this to the Golden Lion he's already won in Venice, and the hefty international box office that his latest film, Rashomon, has already taken, for the film has quickly become the most popular feature from Japan since the inception of cinema. Kurosawa has accomplished this feat despite a lack of backing from his countrymen, the film once again regarded by critics as too westernised, and the Japanese government suggesting that a film by Yasujirō Ozu would be more in keeping with the image Japan wanted to project in the west. Ironically, at a period where Japanese cinema was not taken seriously by audiences outside Japan, Rashomon would not only introduce a generation to Japanese cinema, but make them fall in love with it, and influence countless directors from the 1950s onwards.

Rashomon is the tale of a murder-beginning in heavy rain with two men, a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), who has his own part to play in this tale, as the film unspools its narrative, and a priest (Minoru Chiaki), who will become a Kurosawa stalwart in later years, and whose character acts as the the moral conscience of the events to follow. Still in disbelief over the trial they've just been part of, they are joined by a commoner (Kichijiro Ueda). Together, the woodcutter, who soon reveals himself as having found the body of the samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the priest, begin to recount to the commoner the strange events that have taken place. Here we also see the impressive visual economy of Rashomon-there are a grand total of three locations-the battered Rashomon gate, one of two sets in the film, alongside the almost brutal simplicity of the court house, whilst the woods in which the majority of the action takes place is its sole location, shot outside Daiei Studios.

From here, the trial is recounted against the stark white wall and the darkening sky. The film's usage of light and darkened faces and action are highly symbolic. This contains the film's central conceit: we are confronted with not one but three versions of events, and our other central trio, of bandit Tajōmaru (Toshiro Mifune), samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro (Mori) and his wife, Masago (Machiko Kyō) are introduced to us, and to the woodcutter and priest. Each, including the deceased Kanazawa, via a medium, recounts their version of the story. All three agree on the basic details of events: the samurai ends up dead, the wife is accosted by the bandit, and the bandit is eventually captured by the police, but each account wildly differs in how events came to pass. We begin with the prime suspect, Mifune's bandit, who proceeds to play up his cunning and manliness, turned away from assaulting the wife by being beguiled by her appearance, having already tricked her husband into a trap, and defeating him in a duel for her hand.

Throughout it all, Mifune imbues the bandit with an almost recklessly impulsive sensibility, unconcerned by his capture, or with the actions that have come to pass, often breaking out into hysterical laughter, and called to violence by an unexpected breeze that rouses him from sleep. There is, compared to his other major roles for Kurosawa, something unsettling, and dangerous below the surface to the way that Mifune plays Tajōmaru, and between the three tales he is by far the most malleable, a mere bystander or surprisingly noble figure. It is he that is so often is lit by the sunlight, reflected off mirrors to give an almost unnaturally bright light to the surroundings, or else dimly lit, a shorthand for the darkness of humanity. All the film's characters are subject to this, moving between light and darkness, between-unmistakably, good and evil-so that none of them are truly evil, and none are truly good-as the commoner exclaims, late in the film, to the monk's horror "But is there anyone who's really good? Maybe goodness is just make-believe" .

The film then recounts the events from the position of the wife, whose relationship with her husband is distanced, leading to her attempted suicide after he rebuffs her, his contempt for her-only a undercurrent in other tellings of the tale in sharp relief here-and his own death by his own hand. Tajōmaru is barely more than a bystander in this tale, whilst in the husband's version, told through a medium, he is almost honourable, rejecting the advances of Masago, who herself see-saws between a fragile innocent in her own tale, and an opportunist in her husband's, playing men off against each other. What we, and the monk and woodcutter have stepped into is not a true narrative, for these stories, even at surface level, contradict each other, but three, later to be revealed, four competing versions of the truth, and whilst the film's end does begin to answer some, but not all of the questions, and provides an alternative explanation to the enigmas of the film. But these are by no means definitive.

Rashomon is many things. Some critics and viewers have read the dilapidated gate that the commoner tears apart for firewood, and the assaulted wife, as Kurosawa commenting on the Japanese experience of the final months of the Second World War, between the propaganda, and the experienced strife of the post-war era, abstracted to the Twelfth Century CE, or it can also be seen as a deconstruction of the detective story, to which there is not one definitive answer, but many. What it is, what it continues to be is the true start of Post-War Japanese cinema, at once devastatingly simple, a film focusing on two trios, and a murder, and deceptively complex, and hugely influential. Three years later, Kurosawa would make the most important film in the history of Japanese cinema, and there, to a small Japanese village beset by bandits, defended by six samurai and a commoner, we shall travel next...

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Rashomon is available to watch online in the UK via The BFI, and on DVD from The BFI and Criterion. It is also currently available to stream via Criterion, and on DVD from Criterion

Next week, we arrive at Kurosawa's masterpiece-Seven Samurai-in which the director reinvents action, and Mifune reinvents the samurai.

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