Rashomon review – Kurosawa classic is every bit as good as you remember

71 years ago, at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, Rashomon was the film that broke Akira Kurosawa and wider Japanese cinema to the West. The very act of its screening is maybe one of those key moments in global cinema history, where a post-war world gradually began to reconnect with itself, cinephiles starting to join the dots between national cinema cultures. Of course, Kurosawa was by this point a well-respected director back home, and Japanese cinema itself had a serious heritage: how much would have changed for either without the impact of Rashomon is debatable. What’s still certain is that it remains a masterpiece.

Rashomon itself, as a bolt of cinematic inspiration and of filmic artistry, still feels completely of a whole, its impact directly traceable onto countless directors the world over. At his peak, Kurosawa was able to grasp all the many moving parts of film – sound, light, object, movement, actor – and distil them into something elemental, taking the complex and making it exceedingly simple.

Particularly emblematic of Kurosawa's earthy poetry are the opening scenes, with rain thundering across a dilapidated gatehouse as three solitary figures huddle together. The cut from this thoroughly miserable scene into a shot of the sun poking through the airy trees – the cut which sets up the core story – may well be one of the greatest editing choices ever committed to film, summing up all the contradictions and lies at the centre of Rashomon in a single splice.

Rashomon’s structure, so influential as it is, is crucial to its enduring magic, as we revisit the same story multiple times: the bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune) murders the samurai Takehiro (Masayuki Mori) and rapes his wife Masako (Machiko Kyô) in the forest. As each character retells the story, we lose sight of what is reality and what is lie, upending and rewriting our perception of what went on before.

So then, Tajômaru's story is presented as adventure, the central showdown between himself and the samurai a swashbuckling action scene of daring and skill (aided hugely by Mifune’s iconic performance, all nervous twitching and psychotic hysteria); Masako’s story is all tragedy and emotive extremes, befitting of the trauma at the centre of her experience; speaking through a medium, Takehiro’s interpretation is one of emotions withheld, codes of honour and duty superseding any romantic expression of love. Each story, we quickly realise, is very much focused on ensuring its teller stars as the hero or the victim rather than the singular truth, which in reality is far more mundane and chaotic.

This is all recounted in flashback by two of the three figures in the dilapidated building where the film opens, who also serve as the only ostensibly neutral witnesses at the trial, with these three lonely disparate figures cut against the murder at the centre, unable to understand quite what everyone’s motivations are, nor the underlying logic to their storytelling.

With each change of set-up and perspective, Kurosawa subtly re-arranges the formal rules. When one retelling is expressionistic, another will be action-packed. When one is glumly realist, another is phantasmagoric – and yet the setting and characters do not change. Unreliability, selfishness, and deceit all figure at the centre of Rashomon as personality traits inextricably bound to the human condition, a fact that Kurosawa undoubtedly understood and drew on to create one of his many masterworks.

Rashomon is re-released in UK cinemas on 6 September.