Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950) - Review

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It seems that the public appeal of a high-stakes marital drama, revolving around an ethnic wife painted variously as victim or manipulator, has abated little since the success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Indeed, Buckingham Palace’s statement on Meghan and Harry’s bombshell interview, with its pointed observation that “some recollections may vary”, unintentionally echoed the central theme of the film. Rashomon has long been held up as an example of the “global-village syntheses of post-World War II movies” (J. Hoberman, 2009), drawing on French silent cinema and ancient Japanese folktales, to create a defamiliarising yet universal drama which was recreated everywhere from Broadway to Hollywood cowboy movies. In particular, the film’s ambiguous examination of the woman as victim - as the physical prey of men, and as a prisoner of her social and narrative context - demonstrates how Kurosawa’s psychological elements continue to resurface in unexpectedly familiar ways.

Rashomon draws on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. In eleventh-century feudal Japan, a woodcutter and a priest discuss the murder of a samurai (Masayuki Mori) by the bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune), an event disputed by the bandit; by the samurai’s wife (Machiko Kyo); and the spirit of the dead man. Tajomaru claims that the wife made advances on him and asked him to kill her husband; the wife claims she was raped by the bandit and rejected by her husband; the husband agrees that she was raped, but adds that she asked the bandit to kill him.

The wife, Masago, emerges as the most complex and compelling character in the narrative; her appeal lies in the possibility of impropriety behind the polished mystique of aristocratic womanhood. The bandit - and the viewer - first glimpse her elaborately veiled form atop a horse led by her husband. A breeze lifts the veil, offering first a tantalising, fetishistic shot of Masago’s feet, then of her face, and Tajomaru, as both driver and architect of the story, salivates at the spectacle: “if it hadn’t been for that breeze, maybe I wouldn’t have killed (the husband)”. As the breeze penetrates the woman’s public modesty, it entices the bandit - and the viewer - to do the same, fulfilling the promise of violating her both physically and psychologically.

Rather than providing a reliable exposition, Tajomaru’s account swiftly emerges as only one of several possible ‘truths' behind a contested tragedy. For all the bandit’s initial promises of honesty (“I know you’re going to cut off my head… I’m not hiding anything”) the Noh-like motif of the mask persists throughout the film. Every promised exposure or revelation, from Masago’s dishonour to the dead man’s testimony through a medium, leads to another barrier. Thus, for all her possible violation, Masago emerges as the most impenetrable of all; paradoxically, her womanhood either permits or compels her to retreat behind the performance of victimhood. As a passerby comments upon hearing the story, “women use their tears to fool everyone… they even fool themselves”. The samurai’s wife hovers between existing as a vague cloud of contradictory male fantasies - weak and silly, cold and calculating, passively childlike and dangerously sexual - and as a force which transcends the limits of these, in her unknowability.

Even before the introduction of the female medium who channels the samurai, womanhood, like the Chrysanthemum Throne, carries an element of the supernatural. Masago’s fantasised eroticism - the source of the power and confusion around an apparently simple murder - exerts a mystical glamour over the observers who relay it to the viewer via their accounts, and the camera’s lens. The gulf between the woman’s private self, her public image, and the judgement of these elements by the court plays to the imagination of the men who account for it; for both the characters and the voyeuristic audience, titillation lies in struggling to tease consensus from overlapping fantasies.

Similarly, penetrating the mystique of the establishment destroys its appeal. After an exhausting duel with her husband, Tajomaru finds that Masago wasn’t the feisty sexpot he’d imagined: “she turned out to be just like any other woman… I didn’t even look for her.” As the modern aristocracy well know, exposing the humdrum workings of gilded fantasy leads to disenchantment. While the contemporary cult of the martyred ‘People’s Princess’ endures - with its Kurosawa-worthy plot points of virginal innocence, infidelity and a suspicious death - Meghan and Harry’s efforts to wrest back control of ‘their story’ from a range of unreliable narrators have ushered them back into the human realm, like Hirohito’s Humanity Declaration. “It’s not me; it’s you two who are weak,” shrieks Masago at the two men, in the samurai’s account. “I’m tired of this farce”. Clearly the elements of farce, fantasy, and the forbidden remain just as captivating to viewers of feudal Japanese drama as those of Good Morning Britain.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.