1950 Japanese drama, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō;
IMDb /
allmovie. Strangers meet at a
ruined city gate, and various accounts of events in the woods get
re-told.
We're three years before the Seven Samurai, but there's that same
unglamorous-history feeling to this film: maybe there's a flashy court
a long way away, but we here are in the rain and the mud, and we
should probably be grateful for the leaky roof over our heads.
There are innovations that are lost now unless one's at least an
amateur historian of film: pointing a camera at the sun was
considered revolutionary at the time, and I suspect that even the
degree to which the camera is allowed to move and become part of the
action would have been unexpected to audiences in 1950.
The original story that provides the meat of the narrative, "In a
Grove", had seven testimonies, and perhaps it's suffered in the
cutting down. Or maybe it's just me, noticing that nobody ever argues
that Tajomaru didn't rape the samurai's wife (not even Tajomaru
himself, and hey ho it's the same old stupid excuse of "she was so
beautiful I couldn't help myself"), and in three out of the four
narratives he killed the samurai too. And while other reviewers tend
to assume that the last version of the tale to be told is the true
sequence of events, I can't help thinking that there is no diegetic
reason to assume this: why should that last story be any more reliable
than anyone else's?
But hey, never mind, sudden baby.
And it's always good to see Toshirō Mifune, though this isn't the most
demanding of roles for him; insofar as he got typecast, it was as this
sort of tough guy who's a bit outside normal society.
Many TV series have done versions of this idea (perhaps not as many as
have done The Most Dangerous Game), a story told from different
viewpoints that gradually becomes clear. Often, though, I've seen a
variant in which everyone is trying to give an honest account but
simply didn't observe correctly; to me as a modern viewer that's
rather more satisfying (and consistent with the real world, in which
eyewitness accounts of an event are often the least reliable way of
finding out what happened) than people simply lying to serve
themselves.
I talk about this film further on Ribbon of
Memes.