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Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1982 debut Quest for Fire is set 80,000 years in the past and, as the title suggests, involves three members of the Ulam tribe (Naoh, played by Everett McGill, Amoukar played by Ron Perlman and Gaw played by Nameer El-Kadi), searching for the fire they lost after a vicious attack on their camp by the growling, monkey-faced Wagabu tribe. Annaud invited celebrated novelist and cunning linguist, Anthony Burgess (of 'A Clockwork Orange' fame) to fashion a native tongue for each of the four tribes in the film and legendary anthropologist Desmond Morris worked with the actors to establish the language as a bizarre hybrid of speech and gesture. Blunt and brutal (many of the film's key scenes hinge on atavistic sex or violence), Quest for Fire is a curious, offbeat gem that increasingly engages you in the Ulams' quest. The film is also noteworthy for being Perlman's debut. He arguably went on to refine this very performance in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children and Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy.

 

Peter Wild on 14th September 2006
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