Cast:
Maxim Munzuk (Dersu Uzala), Yury Solomin (Vladimir Arsenyev), Vladimir Kremena (Turtygin), Alexander Pyatkov (Olenev), Svetlana Danilchenko (Anna), and Suimenkul Chokmorov (Chzhan Bao) Directed by Akira Kurosawa (#968 - Throne of Blood, #1385 - Seven Samurai, #1870 - Sanshiro Sugata, #2004 - Drunken Angel)
Review:
“Few people are eccentric enough to enjoy paying a high ticket price to go to see a television movie in a movie theatre. I have digressed again, but it is difficult for a film director who is like a salmon. When the river he was born and raised in becomes polluted, he can’t climb back upstream to lay his eggs – he has trouble making his films. He ends up by complaining. One such salmon, seeing no other way, made a long journey to climb a Soviet river and give birth to some caviar. This is how my 1975 film Dersu Uzala came about. Nor do I think this is such a bad thing. But the most natural thing for a Japanese salmon to do is to lay its eggs in a Japanese river.”
I'm sure that you can understand how some stories of travel can endure in the memories of countless people who end up reading about them and thus lead to further curiosity. In 1923, a memoir titled Dersu Uzala (sometimes referred to as With Dersu the Hunter or Dersu the Trapper) was published, as written by Vladimir Arsenyev, an explorer who was travelling the Far East of Russia, specifically the Ussuri basin in the early 20th century. The title of the book (which was actually the second of three books he wrote) refers to the native hunter (a man of the Nanai people [known once as the Goldi] who lived from c.1849 to 1908) that Arsenyev encountered in his travels that became a helpful guide for the rough wilderness. One admirer of Aresenyev's chronicles was Akira Kurosawa, who expressed a desire to film such travels for years but found that the only way to do it right would be to film in the region itself (which in it of itself would be hard, and add the fac that, well, this was part of the Soviet Union). By the 1970s, Kurosawa was in a turbulent period in his life, one that saw him go five years between filmmaking after a long and consistent stretch between his first venture in Sanshiro Sugata (1943) to Red Beard (1965). One of the things that occurred in that gap after the aforementioned 1965 film was his involvement of what would've surely been a curious venture: the Japanese perspective in the two-pronged venture that became Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). He had spent time on the script and pre-production but was fired early into shooting that put his sanity into question in some quarters. Dodes'ka-den (1970), his response to said fears that was made in a matter of weeks in color, was not appreciated by Japanese audiences of the time. One year after, with minimal prospects (he tried television at one point), he attempted suicide but recovered. In 1973, Mosfilm approached him with an offer to work with them on a film, and he specifically asked to make a film based on Arsenyev's travels. Interestingly, the book had been adapted to film before in 1961 by Agasi Babayan. Kurosawa wrote the screenplay with Russian writer Yuri Nagibin in a production that would take years to shoot with a small crew of Soviets (and a few Japanese) that happens to also be the only 70mm production Kurosawa ever shot; in addition to Russian, other languages spoken in the film include Mandarin, and Kyakhta Russian–Chinese Pidgin. The resulting success was an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Kurosawa would take just as much time for his next two films in Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), which received even further global curiosity.
How could I not pick a Kurosawa film when dedicating a month to world cinema, particularly his only non-Japanese feature? While it might not be his most engaging work when it comes to showing grand scope, it does accomplish a solemn procession of man's place in nature when are placed within its scope for 144 minutes. This was the most noted feature with Munzuk as star, and the Tuvan actor (alongside other professions such as singing) was a founder of a musical-drama theatre for his people. He pulls in a worthy performance to accompany the title role, a man of measurable frontier qualities that is endearing all the way through even when confronting what it means to look upon death and wonder where it seems best to do it, the frontier or in a padded society. I especially like the sequence where he observes the men trying to shoot a bottle and he confronts them with the observation that a bottle is quite precious to waste before challenging that he can shoot the string on the bottle, which he promptly accomplishes. Solomin plays the traveler with worthwhile interest in following along in the trail of the wilderness, which means dignified interest in conveying the place and mood (he narrates the film from time to time) that comes with trying to embark on the trail of life. It is a friendship based on what they understand and don't understand of each other as men of different walks, one of the land and one who lives in society of the land that nevertheless makes the ideal friendship, which makes the last scene all the more rewarding. It is the scope of images that matter most in this film, such as one that sees a rising sun and a moon setting down all in one shot. Naturally, the sequence of two men dealing with a blizzard with resounding pacing also makes a noted sequence to look on in scale. When one does spend a bit of time away from the great wilderness, one can see the size of how man really looks when they are back in those carefully crafted buildings of comfort. The fate that arises from the inevitabilities of age and the parts that come with understanding just what nature means to the people who see and experience it for themselves. Dersu Uzala showed that Kurosawa still had what it takes to make a feature fit for audiences across the world in resourceful timing fit for the curious explorer at heart.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
Next up: the original Ghost in the Shell.
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