THE BEAR ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud Written by Gerard Brach With Douce, Bart, Jack Wallace, Tcheky Karyo, and Andre Lacombe.
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In fact, the apparent viewpoints of the orphan cub and the big solitary bear–mainly that of the former–do form part of the story, but only a part. In this respect the animated Bambi actually comes closer to showing humans from the viewpoint of animals (even though the Disney feature is shot through with an anthropomorphism that The Bear mainly seeks to avoid), because the Disney movie denies the humans any language of their own. The Bear’s opening title and 657 words may not seem like much, but they’re more than enough to establish a frame of reference that is completely foreign to the bears, and the effect of this verbiage is so intrusive and destructive to the film’s higher aims that it’s difficult to understand why Annaud and Brach included it; certainly the story as a whole could have been told nearly as well without any words at all.
On the other hand, it’s surely utopian to assume that a film of this kind, even one without words, could register a strictly nonhuman viewpoint, much less establish one. (I’m reminded of Andrew Sarris writing many years ago of Jacques Tati’s Playtime as a “nonhuman comedy,” which raised some speculation about what such a term could possibly mean: a comedy made by a Martian, perhaps?) Even if such a viewpoint could be expressed, it’s questionable whether any of us would recognize it as such. We–adults and small children alike–have already been inundated by views of nature that are anything but pristine or Edenic. (Even if we haven’t seen any TV, we’ve all encountered animal dolls or Disney products or advertisements that anthropomorphize the nonhuman.) Attempting or at least pretending to take a position toward nature that is outside of culture only means submitting less consciously to cultural conditioning.
The younger hunter injures his foot, and the older man goes off to get help, leaving his companion somewhat frightened and edgy at their campsite. The next day, the big bear kills an elk that he and the cub eat; they both go to sleep, and the cub, still smeared with the elk’s blood, dreams about bees and his mother’s death. Later the cub watches from a distance as the big bear has sex with another big bear; then the cub goes off to gobble up some magic mushrooms, which bring on a few hallucinations.
