NORTHERN TAKE ON CLASSIC WESTERN
Inuk filmmaker’s latest undertaking an effective retelling of The Searchers
If John Ford’s acclaimed 1956 film The Searchers is a western, then it only makes sense to call this one a northern.
Drawing loosely on the same story of a man in pursuit of kidnappers, Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) sets his story of vengeance in the frozen far north.
The film gets off to a deliberately slow start, as Aulla (Jonah Qunaq) and his small band of malcontents are told to leave an Inuit gathering. The four men are looking for wives, and when they come upon a small family group they kidnap a woman (Jocelyne Immaroitok) and her daughter and kill the others. When the woman’s husband, Kuanana (Benjamin Kunuk) and son return from a caribou hunt and see what has happened, they set off in pursuit on dogsleds.
As much ethnography as drama, Maliglutit (the title translates as “searchers”) spends a good deal of time illustrating the customs and rhythms of the Inuit.
We see them tending fire, preparing food, building shelters and managing their dogs. The time frame is never specified, but a few lanterns, a spyglass and, crucially, a rifle with only a few bullets, place this story sometime after European contact. It might even be 1868, the same year that Ford’s film unspools, 4,000 kilometres to the south.
There are certainly parallels
in the cinematography, including one shot of ice-covered rocks that looks like Arizona’s Monument Valley if it were given a liberal coat of vanilla frosting. Kunuk also delivers a powerful mix of close-ups and wide shots, the latter sometimes so vast that the human figures in them are reduced to mere specks in an otherwise tranquil and indifferent landscape.
But this not a remake. Where Ford’s film examined tensions between the First Nations and European settlers, Kunuk’s is strictly about the Inuit — though like all good stories, it is instantly relatable to viewers of any ethnicity. Kuanana receives a loon totem that he hopes will help guide him to the kidnappers, and the ghostly call of the bird mixes with a sparse, spooky score that sometimes includes human voices, as if spirits were howling or panting along with the music.
The effect is dreamlike, with long stretches of gorgeous northern tundra interrupted by bursts of violence.
Kunuk has created another timeless fable of the far north: a simple struggle played out on a vast canvas.