Drying out over Kurosawa

When I get up, around eight, Liliane and Graham are eating breakfast, so I join them and finish off some smoked salmon, which I eat on rye toast. The weather outside is wet and cloudy, today's plan is to visit the cinema and catch David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", which has just been released here and later call at the library to pick up Geza Vermes' "Jesus the Jew", for Liliane. After breakfast Graham and I take Frankie for his walk and thread our way round the canals and roads until we arrive at The Esch, a little park and nature reserve on the banks of the river Maas. We take it in turns to throw sticks for Frankie, the weather is not too cold but a blustery wind and occasional showers blowing in from the North Sea, make it less than ideal. Frankie, of course, thinks it is great, he was bred to mind sheep on Lakeland Fells, so this isn't even considered weather for him. On the river there are several boats, including a fast water bus that ferries commuters between Dordrecht and Rotterdam? We arrive home around lunchtime, Liliane has made tea, but first Frankie has to be made house worthy, this is achieved with a bucket of warm water, to wash off the mud and a towel with which to dry him. After tea, Graham transfers some jazz albums and Bob Dylan's album, "The Tempest," onto a memory stick, so that I can load it onto the hard drive in my car when I get home. Outside the rain has turned to sleet, so we vote to watch the rest of the Willem Breuken DVD and then a film with Robert DeNiro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman, that I have somehow missed. It is called, "Mad Dog and Glory", and is about the accidental relationship between a mob boss, Murray and a shy, sensitive, scene of crime investigator, played by De Niro. Apparently Murray and de Niro were each slated to play the other role, but rebelled against stereotyping and persuaded the films director to go along with it, probably aided and abetted by Martin Scorsese, who helped to produce the film. Any way it is very good and apart from the leading roles, there is a strong ensemble cast, that includes familiar faces, from Goodfellas and Analyse This. Graham makes grilled chicken and rice for dinner and asks if I ever saw Akira Kurosawa's film about Siberia, "Dersu Uzala". I haven't, although, like everyone else, I have seen "The Seven Samurai". Graham and Liliane's house is overflowing with books, CD's and DVD's, so it takes a while to locate the film before we can watch it. The eponymous hero, is an ageing native trapper, who befriends a military officer and a party of soldiers sent to survey a remote lake in Siberia. The two men bond when the native trapper saves the surveyor's life after they are lost in the lakes' marshland and have to spend a night in the open air. Their relationship develops over a number of years, as the surveyor returns to continue his work. Age finally catches up with the trapper, and he starts to decline shortly after shooting a Siberian tiger, a serious taboo in the shamanistic world of Dersu Uzala. The surveyor takes the old man to the comfort of his home in the City, but the woodsman cannot adjust and returns home, where he is murdered for the new rifle his friend has given him, as a parting gift. Kurosawa brings out the contrast between the trappers holistic ecological relationship with his environment, it's flora and fauna, which includes other humans and the exploitative relationships that rational civilisation tends to engender. An elegiac, wonderful film. Graham starts work at seven in the morning and has to be up for half past five, so we all have an early night and turn in around nine thirty. No alcohol today, as we decided that we had all had enough over the preceding weekend.