The takeaway you’ve probably gotten about this film, whether or not you’ve seen it, is that people tell different versions of events in which they were involved, and we can’t really know “the truth.” Not only is that a painfully reductive reading, but it also gets the basic gist wrong. In fact, the film suggests that we can get a pretty close approximation of the truth simply by comparing the stories and factoring in each teller’s motivations. It’s just that the truth we get to is pretty grim; one character asserts that we can never understand human beings’ actions (as distinct from knowing what they did), and another asserts that human beings are fundamentally selfish and possibly evil. Whether they are right is the real question at the heart of Rashomon.

The key to understanding the film may be the setting of the frame tale: Three men seek refuge from a rainstorm in a ruined temple and mull over the confusing, contradictory testimony they’ve heard regarding a rape and murder. The ruined temple fits into a long line of Kurosawa’s images of devastation and chaos (cf. Ran, Kagemusha), but it resonates particularly in the immediate postwar context. Three men struggle to comprehend man’s inhumanity while sitting among ruins. Topical? At times it feels as abstract as something out of Beckett.

Just how much we really know about the rape and murder at the story’s core is debatable, but there’s no debating that the film is about people wrestling to understand how and why people do bad things. Big topic, but as always, Kurosawa demonstrates a gift for conveying big issues through dramatic situations.

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