With his central metaphor of snow—the towering drifts that turn streets and houses into blind burrows where dark, scurrying figures, blanketed by the snow that never seems to stop falling, seek and momentarily find each other—Kurosawa instantly captures the essence of Dostoievsky's novel [The Idiot]: that sense of people as isolated units, reaching helplessly out with their sympathies but unable to tear down the barriers of understanding and intention which separate them from peace of the soul…. [Although Kurosawa simplifies the story, he] manages to convey the interlocking despair of human relationships, quite magnificently, through a simple stylistic device: the triangular grouping in which, usually in monologue, one person explains, one listens intently, and the third, marginally excluded, is baffled by the spellbinding emotional waves he cannot quite grasp. Used repeatedly, this geometrical composition leads almost mathematically to the extraordinary climax of the ice carnival—in...