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Turns out the real idiot, as the old joke has it, was love. The Quiet Duel evokes the war as a crisis of syphilitic contagion, Akira Kurosawa's truncated invocation of Dostoevsky addresses the aftermath as a case of epileptic trauma. Myshkin is a former soldier (Masayuki Mori) out of the prisoner camp and onto the crowded steamer, a scream snaps him out of a recurring nightmare and seizes the attention of Rogozhin the moneyed roughneck (Toshiro Mifune). Spared from the firing squad and now "a newborn lamb" in a "world full of wolves," the baka floats through Hokkaido in winter as a magnetic axis for metaphysical ruptures. At a sumptuous birthday party, he sidles up to black-caped Nastasya (Setsuko Hara) and compares her eyes to those of a doomed captive. Masks and torches and Mussorgsky at the ice carnival, the demonic sculpture looks silly by day yet imposing at night, declares the general's headstrong daughter (Yoshiko Kuga). The glowering scion's mansion drips like a cavern, the meat knife multiplies on a showcase tray during a bout of delirium. "Maybe I was imagining things. That happens to me a lot." Nearly 100 minutes were cut, still a pale flame is felt in Kurosawa's acerbic design: Four characters and two triangles, some possibly projections of the tormented mind, sorted out in suffocating interiors or outside in inescapable snow. The Letter and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne figure surprisingly in the showdown of the two heroines, twice a furnace roars to blazing life to punctuate the scene. Carnations and doubles, money in the fireplace and amulets in the blizzard, a soul's reverberation and negation. "Oh, stop acting like you are in La Traviata!" Konchalovsky's Runaway Train has the reversal, a Russian manner for a Japanese position. With Takashi Shimura, Chieko Higashiyama, Minoru Chiaki, and Eijiro Yanagi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |