leeper@mtgzx.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (11/07/89)
THE BEAR
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A simple and pure and wonderful little
film about a short period in the life of a young bear. It is
too short at 90 minutes, particularly because it feels much
shorter. Rating: low +3.
Some films are just simple enough and pure enough that they look
effortless. They seem as if they put themselves together with nearly
everything clicking. One such film is THE BEAR--even the title is simple
and pure. The film covers about a month or so in the life of a young bear.
The film's greatest fault is that it is too short--about 90 minutes--and
covering so short a span in the bear's life is simply not satisfying enough.
The filmmakers could easily make this the beginning of a series about the
same bear and not have it wear thin after ten chapters. The bear--or more
accurately the two bears--in this film are characters that audiences will
really want to know more about.
THE BEAR has a minimum of dialogue and no narration. This helps avoid
having the film be as cutesy or sugary as some Disney wildlife
documentaries, but it means the story is told more slowly than if a narrator
were telling you plot. When the bear is sad, you pick it up from body
language and inference rather than being told, and the emotion is felt by
the viewer far deeper this way. At the same time, much of the emotion gets
understated. When the bear loses her mother it is probably more traumatic
than the film can convey.
The story, set in the Canadian wilderness, is of a young bear whose
mother is accidentally killed. After staying with the body hoping it will
move again, the bear finds that she--I think it was a she--must find food
for herself. She finds and seeks the protection of a large bear who, as it
happens, is being hunted by a group of men. The film could easily have made
the men soulless beasts, particularly since the film is both implicitly and
explicitly an argument against hunting. To the film's credit, both man and
animal are to some degree sympathetic.
The photography of the Canadian wilderness and of the bears in it is
constantly enthralling. Faults of the film? A couple of the animals look
more like props on fishing lines, specifically a butterfly and a frog. The
film tries to put you inside the mind of the bear, seeing dreams and at one
point a hallucination. Just what a bear would see in these different states
of consciousness we will probably never know and the film's interpretation
is speculative at best. The bear's voice was dubbed after shooting and
seems often to be unrealistically expressive, though I do not have
sufficient knowledge of bears to decide if that is really true.
Jean-Jacques Annaud, who previously did QUEST FOR FIRE, is to be
commended for making one of the most original as well as one of the five
best films of the year. My rating is a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale. If
Annaud promises to make a sequel a year to THE BEAR, just telling us as well
what the bear is up to that year, I promise to buy a film ticket to each
one. If he spends the rest of his life telling the story of this one bear,
it will be well-spent.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzx!leeper
leeper@mtgzx.att.com