The Idiot
“The Idiot” is the most unusual film I’ve seen of Akira Kurosawa’s, and yes, that includes “Dreams.” He followed up his international breakthrough in “Rashomon” with a strange, and kind of surreal, adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, and I would be hard pressed to find a more unusual left turn from a filmmaker whose films typically feel more conventional than others. His next film after this would be his exquisite “Ikiru,” and in a way, this almost feels like a warm-up for that masterpiece. After all, both films are about the perspectives of a man from others who feels somewhat unknowable, and fundamentally good by the end.
I’ve never read the original novel, and I cannot say the film Kurosawa has made inspires me to do so anytime soon, but it’s fascinating that this is nestled in with one of the great runs of films a director has ever made, yet it is probably one of their least known, despite the pedigree of the source material. I will admit that the 166-minute running time is very intimidating, and probably not as necessary as Kurosawa thought it was, but the film held my interest the entire way through, and after you get through some of K’s more accessible movies, it’s well worth a look.
Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) is one of the most compelling main characters Kurosawa has ever written. We begin with him on a boat, where he first meets Akama, played by the great Toshirô Mifune. He wakes up from a nightmare, and we learn his story- he is a WWII veteran, but he has been stuck in an asylum for some time, and because of his emotional instability and epileptic seizures, he’s considered mentally ill (although the phrase that will be uttered about him throughout the film is that he is an “idiot”). He and Akama strike up a bond, however, as they are making their way to the same town- Kameda’s only known acquaintance, Ono (played by Takashi Shimura), has offered him a place to stay with his wife and daughter, Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga)- while Akama is returning home. When they get there, they come across a picture of Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara), a local mistress to one of the wealthiest men in the town; she is being offered for marriage by the man for a 600000 yen dowry because of his abusive treatment. Initially, a secretary named Kayama (Minoru Chiaki) accepts, but he may be in love with Ayako, while it feels like love at first sight when Kameda sees Taeko, all the while Akama offers 1000000 yen to marry her. When Kameda shows kindness to Taeko, making her feel seen and appreciated for the first time in her life, it begins a complicated love story that is destined to end in tragedy.
Kurosawa structured this in two acts, with everything I just described in the first act, and the fallout afterwards. One of the most fascinating aspects of “The Idiot” is not just Kameda, but how people react to him. When he shows kindness to Taeko, he is laughed at by people who don’t respect her, but it’s interesting that Ayako seems to see Kameda, who has had farm land he could live at almost hidden from him by Ono, as a genuinely good person who wants to be good, regardless of what it means for his emotions. The second half is a relatively linear narrative, but it still feels complicated in how much we can take the events at face value. By the end of the film, both Kameda and Akama are doomed to madness because of Taeko, but is there something about her that just has that effect on men, or is it representative of the impact a cynical society can have on genuinely good people? Based on the title cards at the beginning, I think K and Dostoevsky would argue for the latter. And that’s why “The Idiot,” for all its peculiarity in subject and structure, feels at piece with the films that came before, and after, it in the Japanese master’s career.
