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L'ours [1988] Jean-Jacques Annaud's latest outdoor epic, in the tradition of his
caveman saga Quest for Fire, is a slightly grittier
version of the kind of animal story Uncle Walt used to make. In 1885,
an orphaned bear cub falls in with a wounded grizzly and they spend
some time in British Columbia - actually Italy stands in convincingly
for Canada - evading hunters, braving the rugged landscape and besting
predators. While this doesn't really dwell on what bears proverbially
do in the woods, it does feature plenty of ursine sex and violence,
and even a pink-filtered magic mushroom trip. In the end, man and bear
reach something of a mystical communion and decide not to kill each
other, which I suppose should be a lesson to all of us. Based on a Northwoods
novel by James Oliver Curwood, a hoary old writer of this sort of thing,
this has been sold as a state-of-the-art animal movie, achieving an
unprecedented verisimilitude through the use of various tricks that
get the top-billed bears to give performances at least as good as anything
recent by Chuck Norris, Daniel Day Lewis or Shirley MacLaine. It's a
remarkable achievement for its pictorial beauties and Annaud's direction
of the animals, but like those old True Life adventures, it's essentially
uninvolving. Pretty as the scenery and the walking rugs are, neither
are enough to keep you interested in what's going on up thereon the
big screen. You even start missing that horrible narrator Walt Disney
used to inflict on these films. Despite the blood and savagery, the
bears are as anthropomorphised as ever, with the film imputing to them
human notions of family, loyalty and philosophy that animals - I'm sorry
about this, fur fans - just don't have. The storyline is slimmer than
is good for it, and the admirable eco-sentiments of the script are ridiculous
in the context of the unpolluted 1880s. Barely bearable. First Published In: Venue [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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