189 words about Rashomon

I believe this movie takes place at the end of the world. Civilization has collapsed; people, such as they are, scamper between ruins. The film’s famous structure — in which a single event is retold four times, each complicating and rebutting the previous version, in the process explaining each character’s motivation to lie — is less of a puzzlebox than it is a machine designed to obliterate reality. By the third telling we have summoned the spirit of a man in hell. What new horrors can the fourth telling contain? The ultimate: men fighting about property. One chooses a horse over his wife. Kurosawa tips the camera into the sun and lets the drama burn in plain daylight. The torrential floods which fall throughout the movie’s bookending scenes can feel like a relief, after all of this. The discovery of an abandoned baby is meant to inspire hope. The sun emerges. And yet isn’t that the child’s shrieking soundtracking the film’s denouement? The priest leaves the frame with his faith in humanity restored because the woodcutter adopted the child. But I don’t buy any of it. All daylight does is illuminate.