Showbits

Star Trek often serves as a gateway to introduce me to new fiction, as I follow its actors and writers on to new ventures. But rather than new material, the Trek connection sometimes leads me backward to explore the influences that engendered the futuristic franchise. In this case, a recent review of the old TNG episode "A Matter of Perspective" led me to the Akira Kurosawa classic Rashômon.

This 1950 Japanese film is based on a 1915 short story that pioneered (or at least popularized) the literary technique of retelling one event from multiple perspectives, such as recently seen in the 2002 Jet Li film Hero. In Rashômon's case, the story is that of a bandit who lures a woman into the woods by holding her samurai husband hostage. With both people at his mercy, the bandit has his way with the wife … but what happens next? The scene of the crime tells the outcome, but not how the party came to it. The testimonies of the bandit, the samurai, the wife, and a hidden bystander all conflict, casting the characters in very different lights.

Although I am a fan of dramatic older films such as Fail-Safe and Splendor in the Grass, sometimes the gulf in era, genre, and culture is a challenging one to bridge. Despite the degree of style and allegorical and symbolic content, I couldn't connect with Rashômon. Its characters were theatrically, as opposed to realistically, dramatic, and the four variations on the same scene were insufficiently different to keep my interest through the retellings. In Hero, we see the main characters in numerous settings, motivated by unique goals; in Rashômon, we lack that connection to the protagonists, as their stories are recounted by witnesses, and the whole incident of the bandit in the glen was just that — not a mission, not an adventure, but an incident with little impact.

Unlike "A Matter of Perspective", Rashômon leaves the audience with no closure, as the truth of the four tales is never revealed. Perhaps that is where the film's impact lies: in prompting us to question the definition of truth. Its closing scene finally gives the narrators their own story, and the statements made there are more tangible and hopeful than the rest of the movie, offering the audience something more substantial than a Star Trek allegory.