The concept of Rashomon is so great that "the Rashomon effect" has become the name given to the concept of the unreliability of eyewitnesses.
When a samurai (Masayuki Mori) is killed in the forest a trial takes place. The witnesses recount how a bandit (Toshiro Mifune) attacked the samurai and his wife (Machiko Kyō), raped her and murdered him. The accounts differ significantly though as the witnesses share what happened from their perspective. Finally, a woodcutter who secretly saw the whole thing recounts the truth.
The conceit of the film is great but I don't think the story told within that conceit is as great as it could have been. The accounts are too different from each other to mean anything else but the fact that the witnesses are lying. One of the perspectives is from the dead man's point of view via a medium which we are casually expected to accept too.
The sexual politics of the film are concerning. Sexual assault very rarely feels necessary for a plot point and I felt that you could tell this story without it (with a few relatively minor changes). Much of the conflict comes from the male character's negative attitudes to the female one. Some have read the film as being a criticism of attitudes towards women in feudal Japan and that's fine but if you are going to do that I feel like you need to argue have some sort of pushback against it rather than presenting it and never questioning it.
I really liked how the story was framed with three men recounting the court case as they take shelter from the rain at a temple. It takes the conceit and pushes what it tells us about humanity- that we are all out for ourselves. It's quite a bleak viewpoint and though there is a moment of hope at the end of the film the whole thing feels like a very stark piece of philosophy. Some have also taken the film's emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and consider the film to be an allegory for Japan's defeat at the end of the war. Personally, I don't feel that to be the film's main intention but given when it was made it's difficult not to relate some aspects of the film to this.
Whatever you think about the script, it's impossible to deny the talent shown here. Mifune gives an unhinged performance as the bandit- rarely does a character feel like total chaos and an utter danger to anyone around them. If this was a modern Hollywood film Nicolas Cage could perform in a similar style.
Kurosawa's talent as a director is also obvious from this film and he influenced Western directors. He used techniques not seen before like shooting directly into the sun and using mirrors to shine sunlight into the actor's eyes. It's always interesting when a filmmaker perfects their craft away from the microcosm of Hollywood and comes up with concepts that are brilliant and haven't been used before.
I didn't love aspects of the film but the conceit is superb and the filmmaking talent shines through.
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