Scandal

The painter Aoye is working in the mountains and gives a woman who has missed her bus a lift on his motorcycle. She is a well known singer. As they talk on the hotel balcony they are photographed from a distance. The next week a magazine cover says the two are having a secret affair. Aoye decides to sue. A lawyer knocks at his door: Hiruta looks worn, indebted and incompetent. He has a daughter at home with tuberculosis. Aoye trusts him. But the magazine's owner finds Hiruta too and offers money. The lawyer runs the case while talking to the other side. Akira Kurosawa directs and wrote the screenplay. Toshirō Mifune plays Aoye and Yoshiko Yamaguchi the singer; Takashi Shimura plays Hiruta. It is a Japanese production, made in 1950. The matter it treats is the press; Kurosawa takes the rise of magazine journalism in postwar Japan as a direct subject. At a certain point the narrative leaves its lead and puts the lawyer at the centre; the actual story is Hiruta's reckoning with himself. The character Takashi Shimura plays carries the film, and his speech in the courtroom is its peak. The film was made the same year, before Rashomon, and the question of how truth is assembled is here too. The Christmas scene is its best known section; people gathered in a bar sing, and the scene holds hope and guilt together. Its limit is balance; the narrative splits between two stories and the trial section stays weak. Who it is for: viewers who like Kurosawa's cinema and films that criticise the press. Who it is not for: it is split, the argument explicit, and the ending sentimental.