The Idiot (1951)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Film Review

Between 1950 and 1965, Akira Kurosawa directed thirteen films, of which eleven are unequivocal masterpieces, one is inexplicably all but forgotten (I Live in Fear) and the other (The Idiot, a.k.a. Hakuchi) continues to divide critics and fans of his work.  The Idiot is the most problematic and contentious of the films that Kurosawa made in his magnificent middle period, an overly ambitious adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous novel that was comprehensively ruined by a ham-fisted last-minute re-edit.  The Idiot was Kurosawa's dream project, the film he had always wanted to make.  From his youth, he had nurtured a keen passion for Russian literature and he considered Dostoevsky to be the author who wrote most honestly about human existence.  In his adaptation of The Idiot, Kurosawa was consumed by a desire to translate as faithfully as possible Dostoevsky's words and ideas into the language of cinema.

Some have argued that the enterprise was doomed to fail from the outset, that Kurosawa was too in awe of the text to deliver anything more than a far too literal transposition of Dostoevsky's work.  We shall never know for certain whether this is the case, as around 100 minutes of Kurosawa's original edit was removed (somewhat ineptly) at the insistence of the studio executives at Shochiku Company.   Kurosawa oversaw the original re-edit, which had the original 265 minute film reduced to 166 minutes, with inter-titles and voiceover narration added to bridge the gaping holes in the narrative that this caused.  Even with this massive re-edit, Shochiku still felt the film was too unwieldy and demanded further cuts which Kurosawa refused to cooperate with.  It is therefore unsurprising that the resulting film is something of a mess, a grotesque distortion of Kurosawa's original vision that could hardly escape being a massive critical and commercial failure.  In the 1990s, Kurosawa made a thorough search of Shochiku's film vaults in an attempt to unearth the excised footage from The Idiot, but without success.  It would appear that his one great tribute to Dostoevsky has been lost forever.  

Whilst The Idiot is certainly flawed, it is not without interest.  Indeed, it could be argued that this is the most crucial film of Kurosawa's entire career, the first great challenge which allowed the director to develop his unique form of cinematic expression, thereby laying the foundation for the masterpieces that were to follow.  Would Kurosawa's next film, Ikiru (1952), have been such a sublime piece of cinema if its director had not endured the travails and frustrations of The Idiot?  It is no coincidence that many of the core themes of The Idiot - in particular the capacity for human change and redemption - would become central to Kurosawa's subsequent oeuvre.  Neither is it an accident that all of Kurosawa's later literary adaptations are (without exception) far less slavish to the original source and achieve a far more harmonious balance of western and traditional Japanese culture.  The Idiot may not have been an unqualified success, or even a partial success, but it represents a key milestone in Kurosawa's filmmaking career.

What is perhaps most fascinating about The Idiot is Kurosawa's flagrant plundering of western culture in his attempt to give the film an authentic Russian (as opposed to Japanese) feel.  Filmed on the north Japanese island of Hokkaido, the spectacular snowy landscapes of The Idiot are instantly evocative of pre-Revolutionary Russia, and the clothes and customs of the characters are more recognisably western than oriental.  More interesting is Kurosawa's eagerness to appropriate the iconography of western cinema for his own purposes.  Much has been made of the striking physical resemblance of the main heroine (Taeko Nasu, played by Setsuko Hara) to the Death Princess (María Casares) in Jean Cocteau's 1949 film Orphée.  Like Casares, Hara has a chilling ethereal quality, and she is photographed and dressed in a similar way, to accentuate her remoteness and mystique.

Perhaps an even greater influence is Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of Cocteau's novella Les Enfants terribles (1948), which has some surprising narrative similarities with Dostoevsky's novel.  As in Kurosawa's The Idiot, Melville's film begins in a  picturesque snowscape that is powerfully evocative of childhood, emphasising the child-like innocence of the main protagonists and their isolation from the community to which they belong.  The most visible reference to Melville's film is the sequence near the end of The Idiot where the four main characters are brought together in Akama's austere and threatening homestead for a climactic final reckoning.  In both films, the sinister, mortuary-like setting seems to amplify the poisonous rivalries that will propel the four characters towards insanity and an inescapable tragic denouement.  Kurosawa also emulates Melville in his use of voiceover narration and in a sequence near the start of the film (Nasu's snow walk with Akama) that appears to have been lifted wholesale from Le Silence de la mer (1949).  Just as visible are Kurosawa's references to Hollywood melodramas of the previous decades, most notably Clarence Brown's Anna Karenina (1935).  Georges Lampin's earlier French adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, L'Idiot (1946), may also have influenced Kurosawa - notice how similar Masayuki Mori's Christ-like portrayal of Kameda is to Gérard Philipe's Prince Muichkine.  

It is fortunate that most of the trims that were imposed on the film are in its first half - virtually all of the second half is as Kurosawa originally intended.  Once you have passed the midpoint, Kurosawa's genius for composition and expressive storytelling soon begins to assert itself and from this point on you are hooked.  Unfortunately, getting to this point is something of a challenge and it is easy to be turned off by the uneven pacing and painful fragmentation of the first half.  The most obvious casualties of the aggressive re-editing that was foisted on Kurosawa are the performances of the lead actors, in particular Setsuko Hara and Toshirô Mifune, who appear absurdly theatrical in most of their early scenes in the film.  Most of the cuts involved the removal of secondary characters, so when they suddenly crop up in the second half of the film the spectator is left confused.  Much of the subtlety of the rapport between the four main characters is lost as a result of the removal of extended earlier scenes which were intended to expose their psychology and motivations.  Considering how much of the film was removed and how poorly the re-editing was executed, it is a miracle that it holds together as well as it does.  Is The Idiot a great work of cinema that was butchered for commercial expediency, or is it inherently flawed, a misguided attempt by a director to bend the language of cinema to the exigencies of the literary form?  That is a question that can never be answered for sure, but what is almost certain is that The Idiot was an essential stepping stone to Kurosawa's later cinematic achievements.

Film Synopsis

Having been treated for epilepsy brought about by his wartime experiences, Kinji Kameda returns to his hometown.  Penniless, the only person he can turn to for support is his uncle Ono, who is preoccupied with his daughter Ayako's marriage to the wealthy Tohata.  Ono has reservations over the marriage, not least because Tohata has taken a mistress, the beautiful but aloof Taeko Nasu.   As soon as he sees Taeko, Kameda is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame.  Taeko is also attracted to Kameda, impressed by his purity and innate goodness, but in the end she decides to marry the thuggish Denkichi Akama.  Ayako soon realises that she is in love with Kameda, but he still cannot resist the fatal lure of Taeko...