20TH-CENTURY MAN OPTS FOR THE MIDDLE AGES

Leaving a Venice eatery the other afternoon, Jean-Jacques Annaud stopped to eye a row of crispy bronze ducks turning on a spit near the kitchen. “Perhaps we have some heretics here,” Annaud said mischievously,

Few but Annaud would make such an unusual association. For the last four years the 42-year-old French director has been immersed in the strange mores of the Middle Ages, which are the focus of his latest movie, “The Name of the Rose.”

Set in a 14th-Century Italian abbey, the film version of Umberto Eco’s best seller is an elaborate tale of inquisition and intrigue involving a Benedictine monk, played by Sean Connery, and his efforts to unravel a series of bizarre murders tied to the secrets of the abbey’s fabled library.

Though Annaud studied Latin, Greek and medieval history at the Sorbonne, he still seemed an unlikely choice to direct a Middle Ages detective story. A handsome man outfitted in a fashionable striped shirt, white slacks and Italian loafers, he looked more like the owner of an elegant Rodeo Drive boutique than a film maker who’d spent much of last year on the muddy hillsides outside Rome and along the frigid corridors of a 12th-Century monastery in West Germany.

“I’m not a historian or a freak about architectural detail, but you have to make a film look right,” said Annaud, a bright, inquisitive man who speaks fluent English. “My only desire is for people who watch my films not to worry about anything. Once they see a prop that doesn’t look right, they stop believing in the film. It breaks the spell.

“I wanted it to look cold during the monastery scenes. I forbid the crew to put any heating devices there. You can always tell the extras who were playing monks in the first few rows to rub their hands together. But it doesn’t necessarily work for the guys in the back. So no one had to act. They were really freezing. Sean Connery even caught a cold!”

Annaud is a man with a passion for distant places. He insisted that if he had not become a film maker, he would’ve been an archeologist. His first film, “Black and White in Color,” which won an Oscar in 1978 for best foreign-language film, was set in French Equatorial Africa in the early days of World War I. His award-winning “Quest for Fire,” made in 1982, took place at the dawn of human history.

He’s just as curious about his surroundings when he’s off duty. Strolling along the Venice boardwalk, watching the skateboarders and bicyclists, he bombarded his companion with questions about the city’s crumbling old hotels and freshly scrubbed canals.

“It’s not that I have such a fascination with history so much as I’m interested in exotica,” he said. “I have no religion. But I do want to bring people to something new, to find images I’m not fed up with. I want to excite people’s curiosity.

“Our world today is very strange. We have such an overaccessibility to knowledge that it has become banal. If you choose the right program on TV--one with a wealth of information--you could learn more in an hour than people living in the 18th Century could learn in a lifetime. But when I see my daughters watch the news on TV instead of coming to the dinner table, I ask them what they learned, and they don’t remember. All they took away was the images.”

Yet Annaud has always made his living creating images. After choosing film school over the classics, he went on to direct hundreds of successful French TV commercials. He later graduated to feature films, and it was while he was on tour, promoting “Quest for Fire,” that he first learned of Eco’s new novel, “The Name of the Rose.”

Once the film project got under way, Eco made frequent visits to the set. “He was like a child around a wondrous new invention,” Annaud explained. “He loved to go scouting locations with me. He took great pleasure in listening to me visualize the film, wondering where we could put the artificial rain, or the cottage sets--all the usual film-making problems.

“He was also the first person to see the film. I was so afraid that I would lose a friend that I left before it was over, went home and got so drunk I didn’t even hear the phone ring when he called. But it turned out that he loved the movie. He told me, ‘My only hope now is that it won’t be too difficult for the taxi drivers in Dallas.’ ”

Unlike Annaud’s past films, which were generally lauded by the critics, his latest effort has received a mixed critical reaction. One frequent carp has been that he has turned the Middle Ages into a freak show, giving his monks the grotesque appearance of a wandering band of Fellini extras.

“But it is historically correct,” Annaud responded. “We do look more beautiful today, because we have vitamins, doctors and better food. In Italy in the Middle Ages, people lost their teeth at age 19. If you look at Bruegel’s paintings, there’s not one face that’s not spectacular, and very Gothic.”

Annaud eyed a young couple eating at a nearby table. “I must admit that I adore people with something different in their face,” he said. “When I find myself at dinner with a pretty woman, usually after five minutes I get bored and I find myself looking at the woman across the table, the one with very big lips and something strange about her eyes. So I end up talking with her.”

He laughed. “Not that I’m bored with pretty woman, of course! But I loved my Italian actors, because they like to show their defects. I would say to my makeup artist: I know that all your life you’ve been dealing with directors who asked you to make people more beautiful, but I want you to increase their defects. If they have a long nose, make it longer!”

So how has Annaud convinced Hollywood to bankroll his past several movies, which are such a departure from normal studio fare? “I think the solution is nothing more than passion,” Annaud said. “It’s very hard to fight real passion. It’s like being in love with a woman. How can she resist a man who puts a flower at her door every morning for 10 years?

“I was that way with the studios. I would come back every six months, and they would see the same passion in my face. And finally, Larry Gordon (then head of 20th Century Fox) let me do the film. He was worried about the costs, but finally he said, ‘OK. You may be crazy but I trust people like you. In fact, we need more people in this town like you.’ ”

What intrigues Annaud the most about the reaction to his film is how critics around the world have drawn different lessons from the film’s exploration of Middle Ages values. He sees a great resemblance between medieval times and today, noting that both centuries are eras of lost faith, of “despair and questioning.”

Many viewers here have drawn parallels between the film’s depiction of the Inquisition and the political upheaval of McCarthyism. “But that is just in America,” Annaud said. “In Germany, people see the film as a clear parable about Hitler. In Italy, they respond to the spread of heretics by comparing it to the onset of the Red Brigades. And in France, they look to the film as a reminder of the days of Marshall Petain.”

He spread his arms wide. “It’s terrific. Everyone sees their own signposts in this movie. You can see a part of history, but you can also see what may be happening today.”