Rashomon, or the beginning of my Kurosawa phase

Seriously, how bad was last year's Vantage Point? What a case of cinematic blue balls. Easily one of 2008's biggest letdowns on my end, a film that first surfaced with a live-wire, eye-opener of a trailer but then materialized with uneve acting, a muddled script, and an irritating creative decision to rewind the tape every time the perspective changed between characters. The first time the film went all fast-paced backward, I cringed but figured that Pete Travis, the director, wouldn't be misguided enough to do it again. But then it happened again, and again, and then once more, and then about three more times. Until the audience in my theater began laughing and/or sighing in disbelief at each "rewind." Didn't help that Matthew Fox turned in a painfully bad performance, Dennis Quaid just looked one-note pissed the entire time, and cutie Zoe Saldana was killed off in the first ten minutes.

Be gone, Vantage Point. Be gone.



Now having finally watched iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's awesome Rashomon (1950), I've seen what Travis and company were admirably trying to do but failed on all fronts. Really, Rashomon makes me hate Vantage Point even more. It's not exactly fair, though, to compare the two films; it's like trying to draw a parallel between Robert Wise's The Haunting and The Haunting in Connecticut. Just plain ridiculous. Rashomon is one of the finest, most influential films ever made, so Vantage Point never stood a chance, anyway.

The same narrative trick is attempted in both----trying to solve a crime by showing the event through the eyes of multiple characters, only to reveal that "truth" is merely in the eye of the beholder. One of the many reasons that Rashomon so greatly pulls this storytelling okie-doke off is that the actual truth is never given. All we're left with is four vastly different accounts of a rape/murder in the woods. The final version could be regarded as the most reliable, only because it's from an objective witness with no ties to the bandit, the rape victim, and her now-dead husband. Or, does he? The witness turns out to have some unexpected stake in the case, which blurs the lines of reality even further, and leaves Rashomon's central verdict open-ended as the Fade Out comes.

It's pretty astonishing to think that Kurosawa executed such a groundbreaking, twisty tale nearly 60 years ago. Truly light years ahead of his time with this. Early on, I thought I was in for a murder mystery, but then the killer's identity is confessed by the deviant himself, which threw my frame-of-mind off the rails. So he's the killer then? So what else is left to figure out? What a fool I was to think that. As soon as the hysterical rape victim begins offering her recollection to the courthouse, I started asking her questions, but in my head. "Why are you so upset when the bandit just told us that you were fierce and heroic?" A wonderful little device used by Kurosawa here came into the light at this moment---I realized that we're never going to see the interrogator, only the defendants. As if they're speaking directly to the viewer. Answering our questions, confusing our thoughts with each changing speaker. Truth is totally subjective, and it changes through small yet thematically large details with each new defendant.



Rashomon is a film that I can't recommend enough. For those partial to martial arts and fight scenes, you get some pretty badass sword fighting. If you're a movie-watcher such as myself who loves a good wildly-structured headscratcher, it's tops. But ultimately, it's worth seeing just off of GP alone. You'd be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who won't admit to being heavily influenced by not only Rashomon, but Akira Kurosawa himself.

I may go watch it again now. Or tomorrow, definitely. Hell, the film even managed to creep me out quite a bit thanks to an eerie testimonial from a freaky-deeky female medium giving the murder victim's side of the story. And I wasn't expecting this one to give me any willies at all. Many so-called "horror legends" can't even do that.