Two Sticks

By R.C.

QUEST FOR FIRE

Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Screenplay by Gerard Brack

Life is tough for the Ulam tribe these days (80,000 B.C.). Their cave is under attack from the Wagaboo, a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder and plenty fierce. Worst of all, the Wagaboo steal the Ulam fire--the mysterious element that keeps them warm, broils their food and acts as an invader repellent. So three of the Ulam prepare to cross what will become Western Europe in search of their elusive prerequisite. Upon their departure, exotic birds soar overhead in salute. The camera eye grows misty in reverence. Philippe Sarde's heavenly choir surges into oratorio orgasm. The quest for fire has begun. And all for the want of a Bic butane.

Cracking jokes about this $12 million "science fantasy adventure" must seem like pulling the leg of a museum dinosaur--an unfairly anarchic response to an enterprise so painstaking, so educational, so forthrightly solemn. Director Annaud even recruited Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) to devise appropriate gestures for the actors, and Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain) to create primitive dialects, all heavy on the grunts and gutturals. But jokes will come, especially since Quest for Fire emerges less than a year after Caveman, a goofy romp through prehistory that managed to supply the punch lines to many of Quest's earnest questions. Annaud (who won a 1978 Oscar for Black and White in Color) and Screenwriter Gerard Brach have also overtaxed the audience's credulity by dropping virtually every advance of paleolithic civilization into the furry laps of the three Ulam. During their trek, they not only learn how to start a fire but increase their vocabulary, discover rudimentary artworks and make love in the missionary position. Quite a haul for just nine months away from home.

There is something heroic nowadays about a movie that dares its audience to keep a straight face. And there are rewards for passing this strenuous test. Quest's canvas is colorfully daubed with great woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and humanized with a prototype love affair between Naoh (Everett McGill), the chief Ulam, and Ika (Rae Dawn Chong, the daughter of Cheech's partner), a chatty, chalk-dipped girl from a more advanced tribe. McGill brings so much conviction to Naoh's desperate attempts first to keep the old fire alive, and then to create a new one, that he stands as on-screen avatar for his dedicated director.

Annaud's quest to ignite this Fire was a noble one. But the film was always likely to spark giggles. Better then to have entrusted it to a prodigious visionary like Werner Herzog, whose best films cut like a sorcerer's scimitar through the legendary past. Herzog might have turned Quest for Fire into a dizzyingly lyrical poem. What Annaud and Brach have provided is a coffee-table textbook. --R.C.

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