So this is one of those movies that is famous and iconic and much-imitated (I think the first thing I saw described as Rashomon-like was an episode of the Simpsons). And whether or not you’ve seen it, you already know all about it and how it retells the same events from different perspectives to examine the nature of truth and the way that people’s viewpoints shape reality.

So, yeah, it is that. Good, classic, deeply influential stuff. Three random things that stood out to me:

  1. So the acting in the movie is very… heightened, for lack of a better word. Apparently, Kurosawa liked the silent-movie dramatic physical-acting style, and yeah, that’s more or less about what this is. It’s most disconcerting with Toshiro Mifune’s bandit, who he seems to play as somewhere between Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, jumping around and running around trees and what-not.

  2. So this is a period piece even from when it was made in 1951, right, and it has that old-fashioned view of rape where the victim is treated as if they were engaging in a volitional act, which is not only obviously horrible but just so deeply weird, in ways that make you wonder what old-timey people were even thinking.

  3. So because you’re watching an unreliable narrator sequence in flashbacks, it’s not clear to me if the hilariously cheesy sword-fighting is supposed to be kind of hinting at that unreliability — this is how someone tells a story about sword-fighting, not how they would actually engage in it — or if having convincing fight scenes is just a thing that old movies were bad at. Because of a scene later in the movie, I’m leaning about 80% toward the former, but can’t rule out the latter.