Rashomon

Thursday night, Lydia and I attended the long-awaited screening of Akira Kurosawa's RASHOMON (1950) at the Academy. Prior to the screening, we had a chance to view a fantastic exhibit of Kurosawa's art -- his paintings, drawings, costume sketches, photos, and even the kimonos and samurai armour he designed. Almost all of the artworks had never been seen outside of Japan and they had never been seen together like this. Kurosawa was a classically-trained fine artist before he became a film-artist. The Academy exhibit certainly bears this out. The only thing that remained was to present our restoration of RASHOMON to bring back one of the director's masterpieces to the big screen.

Lydia had asked one of our stalwart baby-sitters, Carla, to look after Spencer while she joined me at the theater for this big event. Spencer seemed a little concerned at first but, after realizing Carla was interested in seeing all the toys he had in his room, was ready to say goodbye to Mommy and show off a bit.

Lydia arrived at the Academy, radiant as usual, and tried to remind me to eat something. I never eat at these things. I hate eating standing up as a general principle and at functions where someone is going to come up to me unexpectedly in particular. That moment always seems to be when I have a mouthful of salad, guaranteed. I only had one salad-moment, thankfully, and we went upstairs to watch the movie which, for this evening, was completely out of my hands.

RASHOMON is now in the vernacular as the definition of "unknowable truth." A priest, a woodcutter, and a commoner (or in some translations, "a thief") gather under the decaying Rashomon gate which led to the once splendid capital of Japan, Kyoto, ca. 1300 A.D. The woodcutter and the priest recount four different versions of the same encounter and attack in the woods between a samurai, his wife, and a bandit which led to the rape of the wife and, in wildly varying versions, the murder of the samurai. In the bandit's version, he kills the samurai. In the wife's version she(possibly) kills the samurai. In the samurai's version (told through a medium), he kills himself. And in the woodcutter's version, his "objective" version may tell us more (or less) about what actually happened in the forest grove.

At the conclusion of the screening, we headed home in separate cars. I got home first and had the first opportunity to hear Carla's version of the evening: Spencer was great. He loved showing her all of his toys and playing with them. He went through the bedtime routine and even helped Carla get everything right. At the end of the night, Carla said, he invited her to come back tomorrow. "We should play more with my toys Carla. Come back tomorrow Carla," was Carla's quote.

In the morning, Spencer woke up. He asked where Carla was. I told him that she had gone home at night, while he was asleep, when Mommy and Daddy had come home. Spencer frowned, "But she said she wanted to play with my toys in the morning. Where's Carla?"

Hmmm..."No, Spencer, you asked Carla to play with you, right?"

"No, Daddy! Carla wanted to play with my toys. In the morning. We couldn't play with everything in the toy box at night and so, so, so. She said she wanted to PLAY with me in the morning."

RASHOMON full circle: mercifully, the light-hearted, 2-year-old version.