Maksim Munzuk makes a man’s knowledge of the forest feel earned, and his company worth keeping. In Dersu Uzala, he gives warmth and individuality to a character the writing sometimes admires too readily.
Fi1m perspective
In Dersu Uzala (1975), Maksim Munzuk makes the trapper’s knowledge of the forest seem dependable before we start to question how much the film expects it to explain. He gives Akira Kurosawa’s patient adventure the person it needs at its centre. Yury Solomin’s Arsenev matters to that success, giving Munzuk someone with whom to build a friendship rather than merely an audience for his wisdom. We were moved by the warmth between them, because it makes the quieter stretches feel like time spent with people we have come to like.
Munzuk had spent much of his working life in Tuvan theatre, acting and directing, before cinema gave him a substantial part in 1971. His screen debut, in People of the Blue Rivers (1959), had been a small role. Kurosawa cast him at 65, and his own hunting experience helped make Dersu’s knowledge convincing. Yet the value of the performance goes beyond knowing the forest. He holds our attention even when the writing seems to have decided everything about him in advance.
The difficulty is that Kurosawa and co-writer Yuri Nagibin sometimes make Dersu too easy to admire. His understanding of the forest can seem to settle every question, and his goodness is rarely in doubt. Munzuk keeps our attention on Dersu himself, though the writing gives him too little room to be wrong. Even his warmth with Solomin cannot entirely disguise how much of the friendship is arranged for one man’s improvement.
Later casting repeatedly returned him to indigenous elders and hunters, narrowing the opportunities suggested by Dersu Uzala. He played Fedyka in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Siberiade (1979), then an Evenk hunter, Ilya Yeremeyev, in Valentina (1981). Those credits belong to a screen career whose reputation outside the Soviet Union rests overwhelmingly on Kurosawa’s film. Watch Dersu Uzala for the friendship, with a little patience for the film’s insistence that one of its friends has all the answers.
Biography
Maksim Munzuk, also credited as Maxim Monguzhukovich Munzuk, was a Tuvan actor and one of the founders of Tuva's regional theatre. He is best known for playing the title role of Dersu Uzala in Akira Kurosawa's 1975 film Dersu Uzala.
Munzuk worked extensively in theatre as an actor, director, singer, composer and teacher, and appeared in around two dozen films. Other screen credits include Siberiade (1979). He received the titles of People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1975 and People's Artist of the Tuvan ASSR in 1966, as well as the State Prize of the Republic of Tuva.
