Author: Murderous Ink

This film leaves me the strange aftertaste. Its heavy-handed acting, brooding plot elements, very ideological characterization, and misery of massive edit, all contributed to the unfortunate “almost-there-but-not-quite” quality of this film. I guess this film is filled with everything Kurosawa detractors deplore about his works. Too ideological to be visual arts, “humanity” spelled out every places, Japanese don’t act like that, etc. Especially considering the fact that Setsuko Hara and Chieko Higashiyama would make such impressive performances in “Tokyo Story” two years later, many seem to feel great Ozu actors were wasted in this work. However, my “strange aftertaste” may …

My first encounter with the film “Rashomon” was almost thirty years ago, when I was still a teenager in the local city in the western part of Japan. The story was a familiar one: “Rashomon” and “Yabu no Naka (In the Grove)”, two Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short novels on which the film is based on, were required reading materials for high school students back then. Since I had known the story already, I was not at all surprised about the premise of the film. What I was surprised at was the familiarity of the scenery. Nightmares, a millennium ago The story …