The Rashomon Effect

Krishnakumar Paliath

Movie Review – Rashomon (1950)
Why a Japanese movie? I hadn’t watched much of Akira Kurosawa except for Seven Samurai. I had to watch that after I heard it was the original title from which ‘Sholay’ was inspired. After that a new world of foreign language movies opened up for me in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, a little bit of French and Spanish.
Rashomon inspired me for its technical brilliance and fantastic story telling. The script talks of four witness testimonies in relation to a murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. And to make it worse, they don’t match. The philosophy behind the events makes you dwell into how truth and deceit looks different when explained by different people. It dwells into the importance for morality in the Japanese culture. It talks of the greed and self-interest of mankind and how there are exceptions in between all this confusion in the world.
The direction of the movie is so brilliant that even the flashback sequences seem to sometimes agree and at times disagree the witness accounts each time the story is retold. The ‘Rashomon Effect’ is hence become a debatable theory related to unreliability of witnesses. But what adds credit to the script is the great acting capabilities of the cast and the carefully selected visuals and sets. Akira is truly one of the best directors in the world when it comes to bringing out the emotions of the actors to tell his story.
‘Rashomon’ will always be one of my favourite movies.

Krishnakumar.P, Travel consultant working in Kuwait for over 20 years. Central Executive member of Seva Darshan Kuwait. A movie lover.
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