Elliot's Watching Week of 9-26-21: The Jinx, and Rashomon

 Elliot’s Watching 9-26-21

A few years ago everyone was watching and talking about Andrew Jarecki’s 2005 documentary, The Jinx (HBO), but we didn’t have that channel back then and are just now catching up as the subject of the investigation, Robert Durst, is back in the news re his complicity in the deaths of 3 people - and I won’t give anything away, and I don’t even know exactly why he’s back in the news. This 6-part documentary, though, is quite engaging and provocative, as we see the extremely strange behavior of Durst, who, amazingly, agreed to extensive on-camera interviews w/ the documentarians in order to give the public his “side of the story,” as well as into the strangeness that not 1, 2, but three mysterious deaths/disappearances occur involving Durst’s life and family, and we speaking of strange we see his absurd attempts to escape detection after the 3rd killing, and along the way we see how his wealthy family could grease the wheels - we see it by implication only, but we have to wonder how and why the NYPD detectives flubbed the case so badly, and we see the one murder trial, in Galveston, Texas, in which the high-priced Stetson-wearing defense counsel completely befuddle the overwhelmed prosecutors leader to a terrible miscarriage of justice, so to speak. Definitely worth watching as a rare close-up view of the ultrarich and ultrastrange. 

Not much to say about Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 career-making masterpiece, Rashomon - probably the only Japanese film title that’s made it into the English-language lexicon: a single event viewed from more than one point of view, and in which none of the points of view lead to the same conclusion or insight. In this case, the three “narratives,” set in about 1550, each involve a roving bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who comes upon a well-armed man transporting  (via some kind of cart of carrier) a woman - we learn that she is his beautiful young wife - through a forest. In each version, Mifune lures the husband to a more remote part of the wilderness; the wife follows, and in each version Mifune rapes the young wife. There the stories diverge, though each leads to the death of the husband: Was it in a fight over the woman’s love?, shame on his behalf leading to suicide, shift in allegiance/alliance that leads the wife to betray her husband and run off with the bandit? The movie is beautifully paced, a great balance of still pastoral scenes and violent, sometimes balletic sword fights. The “framing” story, about an itinerant monk who despairs for all of humankind on hearing these dreadful tales, adds a band of melancholy to the whole narrative - right up to the twists of fate at the end of the tale.