The Idiot (Kurosawa, 1951): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 7.45pm
This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 21st, is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review:
Kurosawa's adaptation from his favourite novelist Dostoevsky has an
undeserved reputation as a failure. True, it has a plot which is at
first extremely difficult to follow if you don't know the novel, but its
literal faithfulness (transferred from St Petersburg to modern
Hokkaido) hardly deserves rebuke. The acting has an eerie, trance-like
quality; and the perpetually snowbound sets and locations, warmed by
scarcely adequate fires and bulky clothing, together with a continually
turbulent music soundtrack, make up the perfect expressionist metaphor
for the emotional lives of Dostoievsky's characters. Tom Milne has noted
similarities to Dreyer's Gertrud; like that film, it repays the initial effort required to get into it.
Here (and above) is an extract.
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