a world with hearts of ice
by
Douglas Messerli
Akira
Kurosawa (writer, based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky) and director 白痴 (Hakuchi) (The Idiot)
/ 1951
I
almost have to admit that while watching Akira Kurosawa’s film The Idiot
the other day, I was so overwhelmed with its images that I almost forgot its
plot. I will attempt to reconstruct some of that, but it is truly not what this
film, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, is about.
Akama is returning home to his receive
his inheritance and to his youthful love, Takeo Nasu (Stesuko Hara), who in his
absence has been subjected by the abusive Tohata (Eijirō Yanagi), who has basically
taken her as a lover from the age of 14 (echoing these days a Japanese version
of the American monster Jeffrey Epstein). Afraid that his behavior will bring
him down, Tohata is willing to provide a dowry of Y600,000 to Mutsuo Kayama (Minoru
Chiaki), the man to whom she is now engaged, but the intruding youthful admirer
Akama offers Kayama Y1,000,000 not to marry her. Taeko, perceiving herself a
completely fallen woman, is confused until the visiting idiot, Kameda looks
into her face to find the truth of her inner being: stating that she is a good
woman, still untarnished despite her childhood and current sexual abuse; as he
puts it “You’re not that kind of person.”
And, yes, there is another woman whom
Kameda has transformed, Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga), a young girl who is now
interested in marrying him, but only after a visit with the woman she perceives
as a potential rival. As the Criterion commentary puts it, with great understatement,
“the meeting does not go very well.” Nasu falls to the floor and is killed by
the jilted Akama.
Plot, in this case, says nothing. And in
Kurosawa’s film is almost just an operatic gesture. What really makes this film
so significant, one of this director’s most important films I’d argue, are the
numerous icy landscapes, which reveal the inner characters of those who, in
Sapporo have learned how not to love. And the ice carnival scene in which the
skating figures are masked in terrifying costumes—so reminiscent of the later Susumu
Hani images of child abuse in his 1968 film, Nanami: The Inferno of First
Love—is a horrifying scene of terror that laying behind the actions of the entire
community. In that scene alone we come to perceive that the abuse Nasu has
suffered, the attempted murder of the “wise fool” Kameda, and the final murder
of the beautiful Nasu, are not just incidental events, but something in which
the entire ethos of the community secretly supports. This is a world with
hearts of ice.
It probably should not be a surprise,
given what I’ve just described, that this film was a failure in the theaters
and almost ended Kurosawa’s career. The studio insisted upon a cut of almost
100 minutes from the original 3-hour release, and that version has apparently
now been lost. The cut I saw, the best available these days, is the only
version, still amazingly powerful. But what might we have discovered about this
great Japanese director’s vision from the full original?
This is a nearly obsessive film, and you
can perceive in every one of its frames just how effected Kurosawa had been by
Dostoyevsky’s original fiction. Abuse, love, envy, and the endless results of
those obsessions are at the heart of the film and drive it passionately forward
in a way that later in his career, warrior figures, battling out their hates in
vast fields of struggle, would replace with the inner psychological struggles
of these characters. If Ingmar Bergman had been Japanese, he might have created
just such a film.
Los
Angeles, August 21, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2019).
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