What went into one of the wildest works from one of our greatest literary minds? The Idiot(s) cannot be fully trusted on matters of factual accuracy, but in the unhinged spirit of its portrait of the love between Fyodor Dostoevsky (Johnny Flynn) and his great love of the time, Anna (Aimee Lou Wood) — set during the period when the former went on to write his novel The Idiot — you can trust that the filmmakers and artists had their own kind of singular, bizarre creative alchemy going.
The movie, directed by filmmaking partners and former life partners Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, imagines the pair on a kind of dizzying romantic holiday, causing constant chaos everywhere they go. Fyodor, as we meet him, is an addict and a bit of a mope; Anna is his great supporter and, also, his great equal in terms of unpredictable temperament. And so they go on a series of strange adventures best witnessed rather than described. Except for the few that Flynn and Wood tease in their first conversation about The Idiot(s), which premiered Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival and next heads to Toronto. True to their film’s form, it’s freewheeling, oddly insightful and surprisingly sweet.
