100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #109: Rashomon (1950)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Starring Toshirō Mifune, Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyō

“What is truth?" Pilate asks Jesus this question at the end of their first encounter in John's passion narrative, in response to Jesus’s claim that He came into the world “to bear witness to the truth." (John 18:37-38). Jesus’s boldness stands in stark contrast to Pilate’s self-doubt. Pilate’s encounter with Jesus did not comport with the claims of the mob that sought to crucify Jesus. Pilate twice tells the mob that he finds no fault in Jesus, and tries to release Jesus from custody to avoid sentencing a seemingly innocent man to death. Ultimately, it is Pilate's despair at being unable to admit the Truth that stands before him, and a desire to appease the angriest and loudest voices, that sends Jesus to Golgotha.

That Good Friday sense of moral despair is the central theme of Rashomon, one of Akira Kurosawa's undisputed masterpieces. The title refers to a famous gate in the ancient city of Kyoto. When the movie begins, the gate is a place of rot and decay, half-burned to the ground. It offers shelter to a woodcutter and a priest who recently witnessed the trial of a bandit (played by Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese answer to John Wayne) for the rape of a nobleman’s bride and the subsequent murder (or suicide?) of the nobleman. The crime is recounted in flashback four different times by four different witnesses: the bandit, the bride, the nobleman (through the device of a medium), and finally the woodcutter himself. None of the accounts is completely credible, and Kurosawa is careful not to tip his hand on which account is actually correct, or indeed, if any of the accounts is correct. Even the woodcutter, who seemingly has no motive to shade the facts, has his credibility found wanting. Indeed, in contrast to the other story tellers, who all have something concrete to gain from telling the story in a particular way, the woodcutter seems to be suffering exactly the same sort of crisis that Pilate succumbed to on Good Friday—whether he can admit, as the truth, what he knows to be the truth.

This recursive narrative structure—executed with such panache that the film has become synonymous with the phenomenon of multiple eye-witnesses describing the same event in different ways—gives full voice to Kurosawa’s filmmaking virtues. It would have been easy to make a movie like this dialogue-heavy and ponderous (think of12 Angry Men, a merely good movie). But Kurosawa shows, rather than tells, wherever he can. Indeed, Rashomon is closer in style to silent film than it is to modern cinema, one reason among many why this film is accessible to those who might otherwise be put off by foreign film. Mifune’s acting style is perfectly calibrated to this style of filmmaking, where dialogue is more of an accompaniment than a driver of narrative. In any other context, Mifune’s acting would be deemed over-the-top. In Kurosawa’s hands, we are mesmerized by his energy.

Like Mifune’s acting, this film also suits Kurosawa’s bold visual style. It never merely rains in a Kurosawa movie; it pours. Characters don’t perspire; they sweat like they are standing in a sauna. Kurosawa's technique has echoes of Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and John Ford in it. But Rashomon is also especially indebted to Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, a silent drama famous for its brooding, deliberate pace and its expressionistic cinematography. This is especially apparent in the trial scenes. The film also displays some obvious limits of Kurosawa’s resources in a small film studio in post-war Japan—the score is awful, and the performances outside of Mifune are a bit uneven. But, as The New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael put it, the film “transcends these discomforts: it has its own perfection.”¹

Kael admired Kurosawa generally and Rashomon specifically, but her review faults the opening and closing sequences of Rashomon as “tedious” exercises that are offset by the movie as a whole. In this rare case, I’m inclined to disagree with Kael, particularly about the ending. It is hard not to see in the film’s ending Kurosawa’s imperfect attempt to answer the question of “How can we ever know the truth?” (as Kael put it). As mere men and women, we are weighted down by our failings from a full appreciation of truth, if left to our own devices. But we are capable, with the assistance of grace, of transcending those limitations and making acts of genuine love and self-sacrifice for others. Such acts are the first steps to the act of faith we all must make in order to understand the truth in its fullest sense.

1. “Rashomon,” Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, 484 (Holt, Reinhart and Winston 1984).