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...You feel as if some dim racial memory you didn't even know you had, some forgotten experience buried deep in your collective unconscious, were suddenly being revived...

...When she leaves him, director Jean-Jacques Annaud and scriptwriter Gerard Brach have to find a way for him to vent his feelings...

...Rosny novel on which the film is based, Brach and director Annaud probably complemented each other well...

...At one point he eats an insect the size of a humming bird, casually stuffing the last, crunchy bits of the wings into his ponderously grinding jaws...

...Its members are a mixture of Australian aborigine, African Noubas, and New Guinea mud people...

...Listening to it is like an experience of deja vu...

...The eyes of this man-beast are set back under a bony shelf of brow as deep as the overhang of cliff beneath which the others in the tribe are now sleeping behind him...

...And by the time they've got what they went after, their leader is thoroughly confused by his attraction to a young female (Rae Dawn Chong) he rescued from cannibals while stealing the fire...

...Torn between the need to return to his tribe with fire and the hunger he feels for the departed girl, the leader can't bring himself to leave the camp site which she fled...

...The snarling and growling with which he does so suggest that evolution has suddenly begun going a bit too fast for his tastes...

...But his has no prescribed ways to express emotions or enact an occasion...

...The film has the wisdom to realize that in the evolution of man, the ridiculous must have preceded the sublime...

...He is a blank that evolution is about to fill in, a tabula rasa on which nature is preparing to write the first thought...

...He lies down in a fetal position and sniffs the abandoned pallet on which she slept...

...By being able to cross the line between the two like this Quest for Fire makes us feel as if we are in touch with ancestors who are so near, and yet so far...

...He is beating a hasty retreat from what is human, all too human, back into the animal kingdom...

...How do you symbolize the emotions of proto-people who are as yet without symbolisms of their own...

...They do so, though finding another tribe that has a fire going is a matter of pure luck as they wander aimlessly over the countryside...

...If Desmond Morris's function as technical advisor was crucial to the film, I suspect that equally crucial, on the creative side, was the contribution of scriptwriter Gerard Brach...

...Her tribe paints their bodies decoratively, wears elaborate reed masks, and engages in hospitality or initiation rites...

...Its mystery lies in the fact that it is, though something you have never heard before, also something completely recognizable...

...With the help of zoologist Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and linguist-novelist Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), the film speaks with authority from the very first scene...

...But it is there...

...His actions are very persuasive, even moving, and this is not the only moment at which the film makes intense feeling credible...

...The differences require a subtle tongue...

...When the tribe has its fire stolen by marauding Neanderthals, the leader (Everett McGill) sets out with two other young bucks (Perlman and Nameer El-Kadi) to steal it back somewhere...

...Quest" is a misnomer, for the term implies a holy mission, a dedicated search...

...Whatever the reason, the collaboration on the film has worked as if graced by some potent primitive magic...

...Like my old professor, the makers of the film Quest for Fire have managed to turn erudition into a performance...

...Yet it isn't quite like any modern English, either...

...The activity in which we see them engaged is less a quest than a random walk...

...As this creature surveys the landscape before him, the expression on his face wanders back and forth between an attentiveness that is almost human and a distraction that is still only animal...

...It's like the old gag about the guy who saws off the limb on which he is sitting...

...Ultimately the film treats its characters with a sense of humor that is possible, in movies as in life, only when we know people well-when the moviemaker is absolutely sure of his characters and at ease with them...

...You have to laugh at creatures whose mental powers are as intermittent as these characters' are...

...He's something of a caveman himself, or a hermit anyway, for he lives alone in a Paris apartment that he never leaves out of utter fear...

...Treed by ferocious saber-tooth cats, the three men on this quest typically lose track of their own danger and begin snacking on the leaves around them, with the result that the weakened tree gives way under their weight...

...But at the moment just before that, he must still have been a rather ludicrous, unheroic figure, an unlikely candidate for nature to send on a quest...

...Perhaps this gave Brach the insight needed to convey the terror in which his characters lived...

...Not the least of the film's ironies is that her tribe, which resembles the most primitive peoples in the modern world, is the most advanced culture of her own day-far more advanced than the culture of the film's protagonists, who are clearly supposed to be our ancestors...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The movie is really all by-play...

...As he does this, his eyes roll absently to one side in their sockets...

...On another occasion the girl, again showing her superior civilization, teaches the quest's leader to copulate face to face, a position that had never occurred to him before...

...While Brach understood the pitiful vulnerability of his characters, Annaud, judging by one or two of his past films, understood how such helplessness could alternate with flashes of unbridled aggression...

...Still, the eyes do contain some flicker of intelligence...

...And yet Perlman manages to make the look on his face less vacant and devoid of intention than the orangutan's...

...It is at moments like this that the film is hardest taxed to make us believe in these creatures...

...The tribe to which the girl belongs does have at least the beginnings of such things...

...Certainly in Coup de Tete, where Patrick Dewaere portrayed a soccer player who loves violence and even attempts rape at one point, Annaud showed an appreciation for arboreal personalities...

...In ancient Greece man may have achieved, shortly after history began, the greatest dignity and purity of feeling he has ever known...

...It's at once both familiar and strange...

...Sexually disoriented by what he sees, one of them begins making homosexual advances toward the other, who signals his disapproval in no uncertain terms...

...It may be very feeble, like the glow of the single ember with which these cave people will soon be trying to transport fire...

...His two cohorts, who are watching, don't know whether to be outraged or aroused...

...By keeping its sense of humor, Quest for Fire keeps its balance as it walks along the ridge of time between history and pre-history...

...It's an ocular gesture we have all seen orangutans make as they sit in their cages at the zoo...

...The characters in the film are not capable of anything quite so single-minded as that...

...In it an early homo sapiens (Ron Perlman) sits watch by a fire some 80,000 years ago...

...In adapting the J.H...

...His face is as crude and primordial as the cliff's...

...His expression is purposeless, but expectant...

...He moans and paces in circles...

...It sounds somewhat like English as spoken in present-day Ireland...

...It's musical, like English with a Gaelic accent, but somehow different, full of ancient echoes...

...They exist not only before language, except of the most rudimentary sort, but also before all ritual and ceremony...

...What makes Quest for Fire good is this kind of nuance, a subtle by-play that is going on in it all the time...

...Elizabethan English is more difficult to speak than Middle English or Anglo-Saxon because it's much nearer to our own language...