Now Playing: (1974, Akira Kurosawa) [seen on DVD]
Kurosawa's Oscar-winning drama seems to be semi-forgotten today in comparison to his samurai epics, but it remains a highly effective character piece. The story follows a Russian captain leading a geological survey team through the eastern steppes, who meets a strange but wise Goldi hunter (the title character). Deciding he could be a great help to them, the captain hires Dersu as a guide, and the two men eventually become great friends. As the years pass, the men go their separate ways and then reunite again on another expedition, only to have their friendship fall apart after the captain brings Dersu back to the city. The film is a poignant illustration of the difficulty of maintaining close male friendships in the "civilized" world. Their relationship thrives in nature, where the men have few priorities beyond survival, and where they're grateful to have someone else to share the burden. However, once Dersu comes to the city, he finds himself to be completely out of his element, his wilderness skills and instincts proving useless at best as he sits all day "inside a box." The Captain, for his part, tries to remain friendly with Dersu, but he has other priorities- work, his family- that take precedence over maintaining this friendship. Kurosawa made DERSU UZALA in the USSR during his mostly fallow period of the 1970s, and this is clearly the work of a filmmaker on the cusp of old age- Dersu begins to feel the hand of death reaching out to him after killing a tiger, and Kurosawa integrates his own encroaching blindness into Dersu's character. As expected, there are moments of great yet harsh pictoral beauty in the film, in particular a vividly-directed storm in which Dersu and the captain scurry around to collect tall grass for a shelter. Not quite one of Kurosawa's masterpieces, but given the man's career, the guy's second tier stuff is still pretty amazing.
Posted by hkoreeda
at 1:45 PM EST
