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A Mark Twain quip ("A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar"), thus Akira Kurosawa's famous cosmic shrug. Murkiness is the inherent state of things, "nothing but disasters," the titular gateway is dilapidated and possibly haunted in the middle of a sludgy downpour. The woods by contrast are blindingly sun-dappled, a terrain of enchantment until a corpse turns up. Three testimonies in an outdoor court paint the events from clashing angles, a fourth one sets things straight, or perhaps not. The spastic bandit's (Toshiro Mifune) version visualizes the story as a string of visceral impulses, the breeze that parts the beauty's veil and the priapic blade that towers by his side. The violated woman (Machiko Kyo) remembers it as a nightmarish melodrama, discarded by her attacker only to be bathed in her husband's scorn while Ravel pulsates in her ears. The slain nobleman (Masayuki Mori) gets his turn, a distorted rasp emanating from a writhing clairvoyant with a tale of despondent seppuku. A commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) enjoys the dueling narratives but has no use for the priest's (Minoru Chiaki) bewildered contemplation: "If it's a sermon, I'd rather listen to the rain." The truth is not so much unknowable as it is perpetually at the mercy of manipulative storytellers, and Kurosawa naturally understands that the supreme manipulator is the director himself. Ferocious changes in composition and tempo contribute to the sense of concentrated pictorialism, the bold build-up of masculine appetite and honor dissolves humorously in the final telling. (The wife's whimpering becomes a witchy cackle, the men's duel is really all panic and clumsiness.) But can even the humble woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) be trusted as a witness? "I don't understand my own soul," he laments at the close, though an abandoned baby reminds all that illumination cannot come before a little kindness. Sturges' fantasy deflation (Unfaithfully Yours) and Hitchcock's lying flashbacks (Stage Fright) are adjacent. Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |