Dersu Uzala
by Akira Kurosawa
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Dmitri Korshikov, Maksim Munzuk, Suimenkul Chokmorov, Svetlana Danilchenko, Yuri SolominDirector: Akira Kurosawa
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); Russian (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Running Time: 140 minutes
Release Date: 2000-06-27
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Publisher: Kino Video
Studio: Kino Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Dersu Uzala
Movie Review: Interesting, but not his strongest work.
Summary: 3 Stars
Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
As much as I understand the importance of Akira Kurosawa in the greater language of film, I have to say that I've never really gotten his movies the way other people seem to; Rashomon is a movie I've watched a number of times trying to glean what it is that makes it, as many critics would have it, one of the hundred finest films ever made, and I just can't wrap my head around it. It's a good movie, to be sure, but I guess I'm missing something. I felt the same way about Dersu Uzala, now that I've seen it for the first time; I enjoyed it well enough, but nothing about it struck me as being for the ages.
Uzala himself (Maksim Munzuk) is a woodsman, who makes his living trapping and serving as a guide in the wilds of Taiga. He is hired by Vladimir Arseniev (Yuri Solomin), a captain in the Russian army, as a guide, and the two form a friendship during their time together that is renewed on occasion as the two run into each other. The real plot of the story develops when Dersu Uzala develops cataracts; with his eyesight getting worse and worse, his continued survival in the woods becomes untenable, and so Arseniev offers to put up Dersu, who's never lived anywhere but the woods, in his house in the city. Cue culture clash.
Dersu Uzala won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1975, beating out such luminaries as Wajda's The Promised Land and Kumai's Sandikan 8. I'm glad I wasn't a member of the Academy at that time; that would've been a tough call. (For the record, I should mention I'm not a member now, either.) I'm relatively sure I would've gone for one of the others, though; as I said above, Dersu Uzala is a good film, interesting if a bit slow to get to the real meat of the matter, but nothing about it grabbed me in the way slow films sometimes do (a perfect example of this is the work of Bela Tarr, in which nothing at all happens most of the time, but I can't tear my eyes away from the screen). Kurosawa gives us interesting, well-acted characters in a fantastic framework, and with some of the more stunning scenery I've come across in recent months, but there's that ineffable something about Kurosawa's movies that I just don't grasp. And I still don't know why. ***
Summary of Dersu Uzala
During an unusual chapter in the career of director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon), the filmmaker went to Russia because he found working in his native Japan to be too difficult. The result was this striking 1975 near-epic based on the turn-of-the-century autobiographical novels of a military explorer (Yuri Solomin) who met and befriended a Goldi man in Russia's unmapped forests. Kurosawa traces the evolution of a deep and abiding bond between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the sub-zero Siberian woods. There's no question that Dersu Uzala (the film is named for the Goldi character, played by Maxim Munzuk) has the muscular, imaginative look of a large-canvas Soviet Mosfilm from the 1970s. But in its energy and insight it is absolutely Kurosawa, from its implicit fascination with the meeting of opposite worlds to certain moments of tranquility and visual splendor. But nothing looks like Kurosawa more than a magnificent action sequence in which the co-heroes fight against time and exhaustion to stay alive in a wicked snowstorm. For fans of the late legend, this is a Kurosawa not to be missed. --Tom KeoghArt House & International VHS Video
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