Review: Rashomon

Sunday – After meandering around the house and editing some more music, Matt and Karilee came over for Samurai Film Afternoon.  This had been a long time coming as other events had interfered with us going ahead with some good samurai film watching.

While munching on some lovely veggie tray delights (thanks to Matt and Karilee), we watched the first film of the day Rashomon which is a film by Akira Kurosawa who (from what I’ve been told) is a Japanese director who films have influenced a lot of western film-making, including Star Wars (as I hear about it a lot in documentaries).

Rashoman deals with the murder of a samurai and the witnesses accounts as to what happened.  In the span of the film, there are interviews of the bandit, the wife of the samurai, the samurai himself (through an otherworldly medium considering the samurai is deceased) and a woodcutter who claims he saw the events from the woods.

In the end of the film, there is no way to know whose story tells the truth and that is the point of the story – that no truth can be obtained from witness accounts.  This technique of storytelling has been used in future films that you may have seen like The Usual Suspects or Courage Under Fire.  It’s interesting to see that Kurosawa’s films are known for introducing a lot of storytelling or cinematographic elements into modern film making.

In the end, I found the concept of the story interesting (after having it laid out before me in the Wikipedia entry!) but overall the story was a little slow.  I will still recommend it but don’t expect some amazing samurai duels in this film.  Maybe that will occur in his other film Seven Samurai?