Call of The

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BEAR

Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Screenplay by Gerard Brach

An orphan bear cub. A big solitary bear. Two hunters in the forest. The animals' point of view.

That may be the shortest treatment in the history of the movies. It is surely one of the most truthful because, seven years and $25 million later, the four modest sentences that set this film in motion still accurately summarize The Bear. And, ironically, they send exactly the wrong signals to the sophisticated filmgoers who should be its most appreciative audience.

The outline could as well describe a nature documentary or even a children's picture -- anyway, something bland, earnest or otherwise simpleminded. This is not to imply that The Bear, which is an adaptation by French filmmakers of a 1916 novel by the American outdoorsman James Oliver Curwood, lacks educational value. Or that children will not be charmed by the misadventures of its bouncy, cuddly hero. But the highest pleasures of this wondrous movie lie not in its apparently artless narrative but in the artful ways it transcends it.

The trick is quite simple to describe, ridiculously hard to execute. As director Annaud says, he and screenwriter Brach only placed their animals in very basic survival situations "in which a bear or a man would respond in the same ways." That is to say, by resorting to their common store of instincts: to fight or flee, to seek food, shelter, sex. The difficulties of capturing all this on film, using actors that are willful, dangerous and, of course, nonverbal, requires awesome patience and artifice, both on location and in postproduction. At the level of technique, The Bear is to other films about nature what Star Wars was to science-fiction movies: a redefinition of the state of the art.

But like George Lucas' film, The Bear works not because it is technically expert but because of the connections it makes with primal emotions. We form an instant attachment to a near helpless creature whose mother is killed by falling rocks. Nor can we entirely avoid anthropomorphizing the cub's attempts to survive on his own or to attach himself to a full-grown male as a protector-mentor. He is such a vulnerable little guy, infinitely curious and dangerously, comically distractible -- whether by a passing butterfly or the moon's reflection in a pond.

Indeed, as humans, with a powerful sense of our own species' capacity for evil, we are more alarmed by the intrusion of hunters into the animals' territory than these creatures, guided by untutored instinct rather than bitter experience, can possibly be. We fear for the older bear's life as he does not; we imagine the degradations of captivity as the cub cannot. But these emotions are not imposed by the movie. There is almost no dialogue, no voice-over narration to cue audience response, and composer Philippe Sarde's lovely score is similarly discreet. This very pure picture entrusts all its meaning to images, and then trusts the audience to read them correctly.