The reading of this film is so often incorrect. Many like to believe it speaks to the notion that several people can view the same incident and interpret it in different ways through no fault of their own, and the different "interpretations" of the incident speak to human subjectivity. But that is not what this film is about. This film is about several people viewing and/or experiencing the same incident and then lying about it to other people because the lie benefits them more than telling the truth. They aren't "misinterpreting" the incident - they are lying about it, and they are doing so on purpose. Their "interpretation" of the incident is not what they believe, it's what they want others to believe. The bandit isn't telling everyone about how great a swordsman the man he bested was and that even the woman put up a valiant fight because that's what he believes. He's saying that because he wants everyone else to believe he's as much of a badass as he wishes he was. We aren't permitted to know exactly what happened, but the truth is that the incident only occurred one way, so either just one of the four individuals is telling the truth, or they are all lying. There is no other possibility.The woodcutter's story seems to be the most believable, because he had no personal stake in how others view him after telling the story that did not involve him, but the climax hints that even he is untrustworthy, first by not denying that he stole the dagger, and then by convincing the priest to give him the baby because he, allegedly, had six kids at home. Does he even have one child of his own? Who knows? Probably not. He probably just said that to help restore the faith of the priest, and the visual grammar of his solemn walk away at the end seems to confirm this. The ending seems to suggest that he lied just like everyone else, but rather to the benefit of another (the priest to help restore his faith) instead of his own.This film is not about subjectivity, it's about people lying to each other.
my third kurosawa. feminist but also totally not, amazing camerawork, overall a good time that’ll probably be stuck in my head for the next few days.
50/100Blasphemer! But this just plain isn't the radical exercise in subjectivity that its champions claim. "I've seen so many men getting killed like insects," intones the priest at the outset, "but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this. This time I may finally lose my faith in the human soul." Because people lie for self-serving reasons? Welcome to since ever. The four stories aren't (as some folks implicitly suggest) variant good-faith interpretations of an unknowable event, subject to bias and the vagaries of human perception; these accounts are so radically different that three of the four simply have to be lying through their teeth, and it's fairly clear that the woodcutter's tale, despite his own crucial omission, is the most accurate. (Even if that weren't fairly clear, it would still come across as closest to the truth merely by virtue of being the last one told—a phenomenon that Kurosawa makes no effort to counteract.) And then this soul-destroying revelation that truth loses out to vanity gets mollified via abandoned infant ex machina. I'm just not seeing the profundity here, and if this film isn't profound, it isn't much of anything—each story "works" only as a piece of the epistemological puzzle, with virtually no inherent interest of its own. (Exceptions: the general eerieness of the dead man's account being recited by a medium, and the pathetic flailing of the swordfight as related by the woodcutter.) And while the film is beautifully shot (especially in its striking contrast between the rain-pelted gate and the sun-dappled grove), it's also horrifically retrograde in its gender politics, with the woman fundamentally to blame—whether for being inconstant, or weak, or just so damn rapeable*—in every version of the story, including her own. Of course, this is all just my own inevitably biased interpretation...* Adding a footnote, years later, to make it clear—since someone recently misunderstood—that this phrase is meant to describe what I perceived as the film's horrific attitude toward the woman, not my own. Thought that was obvious, but apparently not.[And now I’ve locked comments because it’s been hashed over more than enough.]
