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MovieMail's Review
Presaging both his adaptation of Gorky's The Lower Depths and his own original Russian masterpiece, Dersu Azala, Kurosawa's The Idiot (1951) takes the novel by Dostoyefski as its premise - but transfers the action from Petersburg to snowstruck Hokkaido, and (in its eery, dreamlike scenes of an almost reportage-like quality) seems to be commenting as much upon life in a Japan recovering from the stinging defeat of WWII as it is retelling and refashioning the story of Prince Myshkin for a (then) modern audience.
As with the book (which is to all intents and purposes something of a love triangle that coincides with an unhappy innocent's fall from grace), so with the film: there is Kameda (played by a wide-eyed Masayuki Mori), just released from an asylum, travelling to stay with unsympathetic relatives in Hokkaido; Akama (Toshiro Mifune, stealing scenes like a mean and moody Elvis Presley), 'a caged animal' who has been unlucky in love; and Taeku Nasu (Setsuko Hara, already a Kurosawa veteran at this point after her performance in No Regrets For Our Youth), the woman who will play off the both of them.
After his international breakthrough and success with Rashomon in 1950, The Idiot was regarded as something of a lesser work (hence its failure to appear on DVD for over half a century) - a regard that was ably supported by the various stories that circulate concerning how Kurosawa submitted an original cut of between four and six hours that the studio forced him to cut. Yet, whilst it is true that the film suffers (particularly in the early stages) from a rather jumpy feel, there is much here to reward even the most casual Kurosawa fan.
Whether its the interplay of Mori and Mifune (fresh from their celebrated performances in the aforementioned Rashomon), the depth and intensity of Ozu's favourite actress Setsuko Hara or the fact that the perpetually snowbound sets and locations make up the perfect expressionist metaphor for the emotional lives of Dostoyevski's characters, The Idiot is a true lost gem that offers a glimpse of the humanising aspect Kurosawa would go on to refine in his heartfelt masterpiece Ikiru.
36-page booklet with a new essay by Daryl Chin, and a reprint of the section on The Idiot from Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto.
Film Description
Kurosawa's only adaptation of a Dostoevsky novel was a cherished project on which it is claimed he expended more effort than on any other film. His electrifying dramatisation uproots the novel's Russian Summer setting to a memorable, snowbound Hokkaido — the northernmost island of Japan and it is perhaps the most contemplative of all Kurosawa's works, a tone heightened by the unusual, trance-like performances.
