The Bear.

Wild Life

THE BEAR, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on The Grizzly King by James Oliver Curwood, takes place in the Canadian Rockies, but was shot in the Bavarian Alps. The big grizzly is played (mostly) by Bart, a Kodiak; the male bear cub--species unspecified--is played (mostly) by Youk, a female. Youk's mother, who dies and leaves our hero an orphan, is enacted (mostly) by a bear skin. But do not get the notion that the movie is unduly manipulative and specious. An adult film for intrepid children, a children's film for deserving adults, The Bear is one of those thrilling movies where you wonder how on earth the director could get such performances out of two bears, a puma, and even a frog.

From his frequent collaborator, Gerard Brach, Annaud elicited a first-rate script, except for one rather too cute scene in which the cub, having eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms, has a fantasy that is the only obviously anthropomorphic passage in the film. Otherwise, the story of how little bear finds and succors wounded big bear, loses his mighty friend when some hunters stalk the big fellow, and gets him and his protection back just as a murderous puma is about to do him in, feels completely fresh and believable, regardless of what human or ursine formulas may underlie it. And Annaud worked so closely with his four-footed actors that one mauled him fairly seriously. The human performers, though, emerge appropriately more brutish than the beasts, but, in the end, both bears and men learn to forbear.

There is something exhilarating about the mountains as shot almost too refulgently by Philippe Rouselot (the cinematographer of the hour) and about all their creatures, directed here with enough wilderness to de-Disnify the proceedings. Philippe Sarde, who for years now has been the composer of choice in French cinema, is not really that good (think of Honegger, Auric, Thiriet, Jaubert), but at least he is not so gross as some of his colleagues. And there is something irresistible about a bear: the powerful build gliding with the grace of certain fat people; the billowing of the fur and the ripple of sunlight on it; the speed and dignity of the beast--something that only the elephant can match, but the hippo, rhino, or tapir never.