The Idiot (Hakuchi), Akira Kurosawa, 1951
Masayuki Mori and Setsuko Hara in The Idiot (Hakuchi)
Cast: Setsuko Hara, Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshiko Kuga, Takashi Shimura, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa, based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: Toshio Ubukata. Production design: Takashi Matsuyama. Film editing: Akira Kurosawa. Music: Fumio Hayasaka.
The Idiot, or Hakuchi, is Akira Kurosawa’s mutilated masterpiece, made in the year after Rashomon and the year before Ikiru, with the stars of the former, Masayuki Mori and Toshiro Mifune, in the respective roles of Kameda (the Dostoevsky novel’s Prince Myshkin) and Akama (the novel’s Rogozhin). And Takashi Shimura, the star of Ikiru, has the key role of Ono, the novel’s General Yepanchin. Setsuko Hara, best known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu, is the “kept woman” Taeko Nasu, the novel’s Nastassya Filippovna. So it’s something of an all-star affair, originally designed as a two-parter. After a flop opening, the studio forced Kurosawa to cut it from its original run time of 256 minutes to the extant 166-minute version. It became something of a brilliant ruin in the process. Kurosawa stuck to Dostoevsky faithfully, while adapting the 19th-century Russian characters and setting to postwar Japan. Mori is, I think, an almost ideal Kameda/Myshkin. The raw edges from the cutting of the film show, however – it’s hard to follow the logic of some the characters’ actions, and the presence of the mob that shows up with Akama/Rogozhin at one key point in the story goes unexplained in the film. The complex relationship among Takeda, Taeko, and Ono’s daughter Ayako (the novel’s Aglaya Ivanovna) becomes reduced to a kind of love triangle. But there are few sequences in Kurosawa as haunting as the candlelight vigil Kameda and Akama keep over the body of Taeko at the film’s end.
