Review of Rashomon (1950) by Ben G — 23 Apr 2010

One of the very rare Kurosawa's movies I hadn't seen, for some reason I always had a bad feeling about it.

Well I was right!

I got enormously excited by the credits. Back in medieval Japan! Everything seemed to be ready for a great moment spent with sturdy samurais, brilliant generals, entreprising peasants, etc.

Unfortunately, the credits are pretty much all that got me excited in this movie. People have talked and talked about the dashing structure of the film, the disregard for time, the post-modern approach and what's not, but the fact is that this did not age very well. I grew up watching Being John Malkovitch and some other films like it, compared to these brilliant stories, Kuro's little tale looks like a first-year film student's end of year project.

There is basically nothing else than uncorrolated flashbacks supposed to reflect the different views people have of what is happening before them. What makes the whole thing un-watchable is how straightforwardly the principle is applied: every one tells his story one after the other and that's it.

Unfortunately the film has two other massive problems. The first one is that obviously Kuro just read Shakespeare when he wrote the script, so basically you feel like he's suddenly trying to include some ideas from Mc Beth in the script that could have done perfectly without it. It seems totally artificial and the result is plain bad with for instance the character of the wife turning slowly into little else than a misogynist stereotype.

The second big issue is that at no moment does the camera acknowledges that what people remember is not the reality. When a character tells a story, too dynamic an editing prevents one from identifying with the teller. And this is exactly what happens here, there is no subjectivity of the camera and once in a while we see things that the character telling the story cannot have seen.

The final problem is the morale of the story. Kuro was maybe aiming for timelessness but he only seems extremely conservative now.