羅生門 (Rashomon)

Kurosawa's film put a device into general circulation that had no name before it and has carried his title ever since: the same events recounted by people whose accounts cannot all be true, with no authorial version offered to settle it. Gone Girl runs it as a two-hander. Amy's diary is a complete, coherent and false account of the marriage, set against Nick's; the film withholds the reconciliation for an hour and then reveals that one narrator built hers to be found. Filed MEDIUM, and the honest framing is that this is a technique's descent rather than a film's: Flynn is working in a form Rashomon named, not adapting Kurosawa.

Bergman said it himself and was not flattering about it, calling The Virgin Spring a touch of Kurosawa and an aberration in his own work. What he took is visible in the first minutes: a medieval story told in hard sunlight and deep shadow with the forest as a presence, long silent stretches carried by weather, and an act of violence staged flatly, at a distance, with no music to tell the audience how to feel. Filed MEDIUM, and the wording matters: this is a stated debt of technique on one film, not a lineage. Bergman's source is a medieval Swedish ballad; what Kurosawa gave him was how to shoot it.

The Handmaiden adapts Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, which supplies the plot. What it takes from Kurosawa is the way the plot is delivered: the same events told three times by people with incompatible interests, each retelling exposing what the previous one flattered or concealed. Park uses it for a different end. Rashomon's versions cannot be reconciled and the film leaves the truth unavailable; Park's third pass resolves cleanly and the structure becomes a con played on the audience rather than a statement about knowledge.