Word: annaud
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Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud...
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...
...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...
...Annaud, who garnered an Oscar for his first feature film, Black and White in Color, directs with ease and self-confidence. He knows that to succeed, his story must be a life-like dream. And Coup de Tete has a marvelously fluid, dreamy quality. Pastel colors spread with warmth and details--nightstand accessories--are not overlooked...
...like a pleasant dream, the details fade as soon as the film ends. Annaud and Dawaere, lestetes-unis, have great fun showing us the delicate power of restraint, even extending their satire to religion. But they never manage to draw us into their world. It ultimately remains much like the tight-knit, snobbish French villages they try to ridicule: neat, petty, and deluded by a mistaken sense of self-importance...