Tonight we finished watching Kurosawa’s “The Idiot.” This was our 3rd Kurosawa film. The first was “Ikuru,” and the 2nd was “The Seven Samurai.” We enjoyed The Seven Samurai, but I was disappointed to learn that Kurosawa hadn’t done more films like Ikuru, and had instead found it necessary to go into action films in order to get an appreciative audience.
I don’t know how closely The Idiot was inspired by Doestoevsky, but this film didn’t seem plausible — especially the female roles. Not only was it not interesting for the character studies, it wasn’t very informative on a cultural level, either. On the plus side, it was interesting to see what winter and snow are like in northern Japan.
And the actors spoke clearly. Even though I had spent a little time with the first of the Pimsleur Japanese courses, I could recognize hardly anything the actors in the first two films said, even with subtitles. Their talk seemed to be all slurred, especially in Seven Samurai. However, in The Idiot, there are a lot of fragments of speech that are somewhat recognizable to me.
It made me think it might be possible to learn to understand some of the language, after all. It’s tempting to give it another effort. But I had put the Japanese aside so I could spend more time on Russian and some other European languages, so I will stick with that for now.