Dersu Uzala

Akira Kurosawa's Academy Award winning Dersu Uzala (Best Foreign Language Film, 1975) is a film about friendship through time, but also is about the clash of progress and altruism.

Unable to secure financing to make a film in Japan, the legendary director went all the way to effing Siberia to make this movie, the only film he made outside his home country.

Incidentally, I have another 25 or so Akira Kurosawa films to discuss after this one. Perhaps that will affect my readership. I don't care.

When I started grad school, I signed up for some classes in the Ohio University School of Film, which was a separate entity from the School of Telecommunications. I ended up taking film classes as electives to my screenwriting degree. One of the first classes I took was Film History 1, which focused on narrative. Obviously, we covered Kurosawa in that class.

I knew of Kurosawa, but didn't take an interest until after this class. Several years passed before I really started collecting his films on DVD. I still don't have all of them because Criterion won't release his first four films outside of the exhaustive (and expensive) boxed set released a year or two ago. I would like to take this moment to point out that Armageddon is available from the Criterion Collection but you can't get Kurosawa's first four films.

Dersu Uzala was one of the last Kurosawa DVDs added to my collection. I held off for some time because there are currently two releases: the Kino Video version pictured above and the Ruscico version from Russia, which is spread across two DVDs.

I chose the Kino because I'd rented this version from Netflix and knew what I was getting. Neither current Region 1 release is particularly pretty, with lots of grain, washed out colors, and glorious 2.0 sound. In fact the film is downright crappy looking in parts, but I'm a completist. I need everything.

Dersu Uzala is a longish film, around 2 1/2 hours, and the film seems longer because of several slow, quieter passages rather than grandiose battle sequences. The film looks and feels as though shot on the cheap, but that's not a negative criticism — Kurosawa spent the bulk of his career making films on the cheap.

There is, however, an intense sequence set on the wastelands of Siberia, when Dersu the trapper and Captain Arsenyev find themselves lost with the sun setting and the temperature dropping. If they don't find shelter or find their expedition party, they'll surely die.

Thinking quickly, Dersu yells to Arsenyev, "Cut the grass!" The two take out knives and start chopping down dead weeds, piles and piles of dead weeds, running themselves to exhaustion while the sun drops. Finally, the scene fades to black and we find Dersu and Arsenyev huddled inside a makeshift shelter of grass, and they survive the Siberian nightfall.

Dersu is a hunter, a mountain man as it were, but when he starts to lose his eyesight, Arsenyev offers to take him back to the city where Dersu can stay with Arsenyev's family. Dersu does not fit in, and eventually wants to return to the wild.

This film is about friendship through the years, as Dersu and Arsenyev separate after Arsenyev's expedition in Siberia and reunite several years later. Seeing this film gets me thinking about the friends I've drifted away from through the years, generally becoming different people and going our separate ways without some huge falling out. Sometimes I lament those lost friends, most of whom are still out there, and I hope they're doing well. I also hope that if I see or talk to them again, we can pick up where we left off, more or less. I wonder if that's possible with some of them.

Dersu Uzala is a slow film, a methodical film, but a heartfelt one, and definitely one of Kurosawa's stronger works. However, unlike most of Kurosawa's oeuvre, Dersu Uzala is not available from the Criterion Collection. Turns out, Criterion released the laserdisc about 20 years ago, but since then, Criterion has not secured the rights to release on DVD or Blu-Ray. I trust that Criterion and Dersu will reunite someday.