Kurosawa’s THE IDIOT (1951), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel set in post-war Japan, was originally conceived as a 265 minute film with an intermission. That cut didn’t work for the studio and Kurosawa cut it down to 180 minutes. The studio asked for further cuts and this is how we’ve ended up with the 166 minute currently available. When I began watching and knew nothing of its history, my first thought was ‘Kurosawa’s not afraid of length.’ Little did I know. The film was  a critical and box-office failure upon first release and would have sunk Kurosawa’s career but for the international success of RASHOMON. The extra 99 minutes of the original cut now seem irretrievably lost (though one can hope).

This history helps explain why the film seems so narratively inelegant, title cards offering so much background, voice-over at the beginning also used to fill in information that could have been shown rather than told. I now realise it probably once was. The story is a complex one with many sub-plots but at its basis is a triangle focused on Taeke Nasu (Setsuko Hara), a woman sold at a very young age to be an industrialist’s mistress and traumatised ever since. The two men in love with her are a) Kinji Kameda (Masayuko Mori), the titular Idiot, once mistakenly convinced of war crimes and rescued at the last minute from the firing squad. He himself thinks this experience affected his brain and  traumatised him into idiocy. The other suitor is Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune), a rich, handsome, self-destructive playboy. Whilst watching it I imagined it as a thirties Hollywood film with Garbo, Leslie Howard and Clark Gable in the roles and the film itself as a juicy, pulpy saga, probably as far from Dostoyevky as you can get.

There are incredibly beautiful moments and sequences. The moment where the two men arrive in Sapporo and see Taeko Suso’s image in a storefront is beautifully conceived. The gorgeous photo is framed, behind a window, their adoring faces frame hers, but only as a reflection in the window itself. It’s a beautifully conceived image, all these hopes, illusions, longings, desires, just a play of light, evanescent, a projection onto an image; an illusion.

There are extraordinary set-pieces; the run in the snow after Kameda leaves Akema with the butchers’ knife, first contemplating suicide, then out to kill him. The whole of the Sapporo carnival sequence with people skating in phantasmagoric costumes as lovers wait to reveal their desires; there’s extraordinary images (black shadows blinking on Taeko Nasu’s face as suitors bid to become her next lover; and like other Kurosawa film, this one makes extraordinary use of the weather and the elements, here snow, ice, cold, blizzards, a flickering stove to ward off all of this so loaded it periodically bursts into flames, surely a symbol of the burning and unquenchable desire they each feel. The first part of the film is titled ‘Love and Loathing’, the second ‘Love and Agony’.

At the very beginning of the film a title card informs us that Dostoyevsky tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world and that ‘In this world goodness and Idiocy are often equated’. This particular film, like Rashomon, also deals with questions of truth but very differently. Here everyone except the idiot lies, tells half-truths, lies by omission, lie to themselves. That the idiot doesn’t is what makes him an idiot but it’s also what makes him good, why even people who want to hate him can’t. Goodness is valued by others even when they themselves can’t achieve it, and most don’t even aspire to it. So like the cliché of Russian Literature, people love, anguish suffer and at they end die too young. It is a mess of a film but one that I loved watching and it has many extraordinary sequences. I would love to see the original cut if it ever resurfaces.

One of the pleasures in the process of intensifying is that I am now recognising actors, those who appear in Kurosawa’s other films (Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura) and also those who appear in famous Japanese films of the period, here Setuko Hara and Chieko Higashiyama, who so beaitufifully played, respectively, the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law in Ozu’s Tokyo Story)

José Arroyo