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
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews