The Idiot (Hakuchi)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Eijirô Hisaita from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1951/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu
[box] Mutsuo Kayama, the secretary: What could be so frightening about that idiot?[/box]
This is a beautiful, fantastically acted film. Unfortunately, it is also 166 minutes long and I don’t feel like I quite got the point.
Kurosawa has transposed the setting of Dostoevsky’s novel from Tsarist Russia to post-war Hokkaido. The story takes place mostly in severe winter weather.
Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) has just been released from an American military hospital where he had been treated for “epileptic idiocy”. This condition developed after Kameda was spared at the very last minute from execution after having been erroneously charged with being a war criminal. As he waited to die, Kameda felt an enormous love for everyone and regret that he had not been kinder or more considerate.
On his train journey back to Sapporo, Kameda is befriended by Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune) who is headed there to reunite with and attempt to marry the woman he loves, Taeku Nasu (Setsuko Hara). On arrival, the two stop to admire her portrait which is on display at a photographer’s shop. Kameda immediately feels compassion for Taeku due to the sadness he sees in her eyes.
Taeko was taken as a fourteen-year-old girl to be the mistress of a rich man who apparently forced her into some unspeakable degradation. The man has now tired of her and has offered Ayako, the son of Ono (Takashi Shimura), 600,000 yen to marry her. Akama raises a million yen in a bid to marry her himself. But Kameda quietly tells Taeko shed is not the person her trials have made her and she should not marry. He offers to take care of her although he has no money. Then Ono reveals that Kameda is actually the owner of a valuable estate that Ono has appropriated.
But Taeko cannot bear to “ruin” someone as good as Kameda. Although Kameda’s feelings for Taeko are more tender than passionate and despite their real friendship, Kameda and Akama are at odds over her fate for the rest of the film. In the meantime, Kameda engages in a fairly bizarre courtship with Oda’s daughter. Tragedy ensues.
Obviously, with this cast the viewer is in store for some tremendous acting. Masayuki Mori, who played the samurai in Rashomon, is the standout as the “idiot”. You have to love him. Mifune and especially Hara were almost unrecognizable to me during the first part of the film and very good.
The film begins with a text saying that Dostoevsky wanted to create a character who was completely good and the only way to do so in this corrupt world was to make him an idiot. The story is supposed to show the destruction of such a character by life. I suppose this is true but the message kind of got lost for me in the extremely convoluted plot.
I think this movie could have lost forty-five minutes and been improved. Be that as it may, the version I watched was already cut from the Kurosawa’s original, which clocked in at 265 minutes and the 180 minute version shown at the film’s premier. Since I still don’t understand some of the plot points maybe they were left on the cutting room floor.
