Under the Northern Lights / Pod severnym siyaniyem / オーロラの下で (1990)

Obscure Japanese Film #50

Koji Yakusho

This Japanese-Russian co-production stands very much in the shadow of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), the Russian film which had rescued the great director from a 5-year dry spell and returned him to international success with an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Like Dersu Uzala, Under the Northern Lights is another wilderness adventure set in the early years of the 20^th-century. 

 

Junko Sakurada

 

The leading role is played perfectly by Koji Yakusho, a student of Tatsuya Nakadai’s who would go on to international success himself a few years later as the star of Shall We Dance? (1996) and The Eel (1997). Here, he is Genzo, a hunter and fur trapper who slips across to eastern Siberia in the hope of collecting enough hides to buy back his fiancée (Junko Sakurada) from the geisha house into which she has been sold by her poverty-stricken family. When some locals rob him, he is helped by a Russian, Arseniy (Andrei Boltnev), with whom he forms an unlikely friendship. Arseniy lives with his widowed sister Anna (Marina Zudina) and her child, and Genzo develops a bond with them too. However, the difficulties he faces mean that it takes him a long time to raise the money necessary to fulfil his dream.

Tetsuro Tanba

 

Returning to Japan after an absence of 5 years, he discovers that, believing Genzo to be dead, his former fiancée has married and had a child. In the meantime, the Russian Revolution breaks out and the Japanese government is concerned about the possibility of it spreading to Japan. Genzo, having learned to speak Russian, finds himself heading back to Siberia after being recruited as a spy by a government official (Tetsuro Tanba). On his return, he checks in on Arseniy, who turns out to be so ill that he is confined to his bed. Genzo attempts to nurse him back to health, but Arseniy dies. Genzo then has to fulfil his friend’s last wish – to deliver a vital serum to combat an epidemic in the remote rural community where Anna and her daughter are now living. In order to get there, Genzo has to travel by dog-sled and finds himself battling for survival in the harsh Siberian winter. Along the way, he receives some unlikely help in the shape of Buran, a dog which is half-wolf and which he had previously tried to kill for bounty.

If the serum part sounds familiar, it’s probably because the producers incorporated elements of a true story which occurred in Alaska in 1925 involving a Siberian Husky that later served as the basis for the animated American film Balto (1995). This part was not in the 1971 children’s book by Yukio Togawa upon which Under the Northern Lights is based, and I felt that the producers were over-egging the pudding a little by adding it. 

Maksim Munzuk (Dersu Uzala) in a cameo

 

For some reason, IMDb credits three directors on this film, although the film’s own credits list only Toshio Goto as director. I suspect that Sergey Vronski, a cinematographer, shot some second unit footage and Petras Abukiavicus, who co-wrote the screenplay, directed the Russian actors. In any case, Goto had experience with this challenging type of movie, having made The Old Bear Hunter (1982) and Born Wild, Run Free (1987), two films also mostly shot in remote locations and featuring wild animals. Animal welfare did not seem especially high on his agenda, though, and Under the Northern Lights features numerous scenes of animals attacking each other – it’s certainly not a film that could convincingly claim that ‘no animals were harmed in the making.’ These scenes may have prevented the film from being passed by the censor in some countries and may well be the reason why it seems to have had little or no release in the English-speaking world.   

As one would expect from a Russian-Japanese co-production shot in Siberia with a half-dog, half-wolf as one of the main actors, the film had an immensely troubled and protracted shoot. While it certainly has its impressive aspects – most notably, the photography of the Siberian wilderness – the story is all over the place, and the music (full of cymbal crashes and swelling strings) strains too hard for emotion. Worth seeing, then, but certainly not on a par with Dersu Uzala.

Watched with subtitles I auto-translated from Serbian (they didn’t come out well). The Japanese dialogue had Russian narration over the top.