The movie, widely believed to be the reason for the introduction of the best foreign film Oscar, starts as a conversation between 3 people – a woodcutter(Takashi Shimura), a priest(Minoru Chiaki) and a commoner(Kichijiro Ueda) - who take shelter from the torrential rains in the city gates (Rashomon is a city gate in Kyoto). The wood cutter and the priest are deeply distraught by events they had witnessed at a court case where the notorious bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune) was tried for the rape of Masako (Machiko Kyô), and the murder of her samurai husband, Takehiro (Masayuki Mori). Each of the players in the drama - Tajômaru, Masako and the dead Takehiro, speaking through a medium, had narrated the sequence of events. Surprisingly, each of the events had considerable variances. Then the woodcutter confesses that he had also witnessed the events unfolding and narrates a story, which is, not surprisingly, also inconsistent with the other versions. The priest, who seems the most disturbed by what he had seen, takes this experience as indicative of the decadence in society. All this while, the rain continues to hammer in the background, alluding to the confusion in the minds of the characters as they try and piece the puzzle together. The ending, interestingly, acknowledges the presence of hope in this Pandora’s world. Upon stumbling upon a well garbed new born baby in the shelter, while the commoner pilfers the clothes, the woodcutter adopts the baby as his own. The skies then clear up and the characters return to their worlds, made more livable by the woodcutter’s kind act. 

The human mind subconsciously assumes anything seen to be the absolute truth. Kurasowa exploits this to the hilt by showing the versions as a series of flashbacks rather than as bland court room narrations. The impact of these scenes on our senses is magnified by Toshiro Mifune’s raw animal energy and the versatility of Machiko Kyo - the pivot in the story - whose demeanor changes from vulnerable to sexual predator, depending on whose version it is. Consequently, for the viewer, the fact that there are stark differences in the series of events seen with his own eyes is even more intriguing.  

This innovative narrative set a precedent and seeded a whole new genre of movies. There have been attempts at recreating its magic, most notably, by Bryan Singer in The Usual Suspects. However, it has only a sliver of the original’s complexity – an open-ended question about the veracity of events seen in the flashback. Rashomon has been immortalized in pop culture in a brilliant self-referential dialogue in The Simpsons where Marge and Homer have differing views on Homer’s opinion on Rashomon. Closer home, the gory Kamal Haasan flick Virumandi was a good attempt, but with one vital difference – at the end of the movie, the viewer knows the actual story. Unlike in Rashomon where, even after the end, the viewer is no closer to piecing together the actual sequence of events. In three stories, the narrator is the killer. The bandit claims he killed the samurai out of love for the woman and that that it was consensual sex and not rape. His explanation makes the killing seem like an unintended consequence of an external circumstance and also showcases his skill as a fighter. The husband, a proud Samurai, claims to have committed Hara-Kiri after seeing his wife having sex with a stranger. The wife’s story - getting raped by a bandit, ostracized by her husband at a time when she needed comforting and later killing him in a freak accident - makes her seem like an unfortunate victim in every possible way.  

Sifting through the various versions with a fine tooth-comb to arrive at a logically consistent solution is a pointless exercise. Solving the conundrum is not the raison d’etre of this tour de force. Kurasowa asks questions of a more fundamental nature. Is there an objective reality? Are we all prisoners of our own creation? If yes, then in what way should we modify the conclusions we arrive at after our interactions with people if we can’t take in what the other person says at face value? 

The answers to these questions depend on how much credibility you assign to the various witnesses and their motives. A rational explanation would be that all the narrators are consciously trying to protect themselves. The other extreme position would be to assume that the human mind is subconsciously conditioned to view events with a jaundiced eye at all times. My guess is that the truth is in between. This is what Rashomon seeks to tell us - to acknowledge the shades of grey in every human interaction. Turning the argument around, one can say that we humans haven’t developed the ability to completely understand others’ point of view. At the risk of sounding uber-simplistic, I must say this explains a lot of things - why the Arabs are at odds with the western world, why Prakash Karat and Manmohan Singh can’t see eye-to-eye, why Ross and Rachel broke up and why the Columbia shuttle disaster happened. Ok, maybe not the last one.