My Uncle Antoine

This film has consistently been voted as the greatest Canadian film ever made in various critics polls over the years. Revered New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael hailed it as a small masterpiece upon original release but it is the sort of slow, intimate, character-based drama that has never achieved the sort of wide appeal (outside of Canada) that more plot focused films have. Watching some of the supplementary material on the Criterion Collection disc, it is also clear that there are many cultural references in the film that will mean more to a Canadian (particularly a French Canadian) than to other viewers.

The film meanders amiably along, capturing in unhurried pace the life of rural 1940's Quebec, in this case an asbestos mining town. The main characters are Benoit, an orphaned boy, the local undertaker Antoine and his assistant Fernand played by the director himself Claude Jutra. Eventually the film reaches its big set-piece, a long, extended night sequence where Benoit and Antoine (covered in furs) must traverse the icy, snow covered landscape via sled to retrieve the body of a boy who has died at a farmhouse.

The director was hailed as the new savior of Canadian cinema at the time of release, but unfortunately never achieved the level of success later on that he did with this film. He mysteriously disappeared one winter and his body was discovered the following spring after the ice had thawed...a simple note attached, "My name is Claude Jutra".

This isn't quite the best Canadian film ever, IMO. I won't get off track and name 3 or 4 better. Just a couple of nights before I'd seen "The Bicycle Thief", the highly rated Italian classic, and there are some parallels. Both filmmakers shot their film in a specific time and specific place, with minimal resources in terms of sets and cast. And the result in both cases is fascinating and a joy to watch for the realistic setting and characters alone. The lingering shots over faces and landscape almost make this worth watching on its own. That being said, this one isn't quite in the same league as the Italian classic. The movie is shot in a frigid, barren Quebec asbestos mining town. That frigidity is contrasted with the warmth of the people and the eye of the filmmaker Claude Jutra. Basically, what you get is a series of vignettes that are likely nostalgic recollections of Jutra - not ha, ha funny - but poignant, and probably sometimes difficult at the time, but now warmed over with the patine of nostalgia. The movie meanders; there is little tension. Somewhere around half to two thirds way through the story begins. Everyone you've met to this point is involved, and you've gotten to know these characters rather well; so have a little patience at the outset. The story is a good one; it will leave you thinking, and it involves sex, love and death, all the basic elements. If you like Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, all that kind of stuff, you won't be disappointed by this.

Near Quebec, a rural mine town, the establishing shots in the opening of Claude Jutra's much vaunted work, MON ONCLE ANTOINE cast its magic spell on us with its expansively mountainous locale, and the time-frame of the film's diegesis is clocked in 1949, right before Christmas.

Looking through the eyes of a teenage boy Benoit (Gagnon), Jutra's ethnographic artwork assiduously records what he sees and experiences in a few days' span, Benoit's uncle Antoine (Duceppe) and auntie Cécile (Thibault) run a general shop but also manage the town's undertaker business, a funeral ceremony near the beginning presided by Antoine and his shop clerk Fernand (Jutra himself, oozing with assured apathy) subtly conveys a ghost of friction between them, soon an overtly uncomfortable shot of Fernand and Cécile's encroaching closeness hints something smack of a tacitly connived adultery is on the sly, maybe that's why. On the Christmas Eve, townsfolk gather in the shop to see the Christmas display and purchase gifts, a young couple announce their engagement, a voluptuous wife comes to try on her ordered corset, by default becomes the cynosure, on the same floor, intrigued by his awakening curiosity of the other sex, Benoit fumbles around Carmen (Champagne), a comely girl of his age who also works in the shop, a budding puppy love is always adorable.

Still, even at Christmas, people die, Madame Poulin's (Loiselle) eldest son dies that day (the cross overhangs is jarringly prominent in that frame of pathos), and Benoit is permitted, for the very first time, to go with Antoine to pick up the body, to-and-fro, it is a sortie saddled with abundant snow, piercing coldness, influence of liquor, and an ingenuous teen's rite-of-passage to face death at point-blank range and saver his first taste of misery, deception and dissatisfaction from the adult world. From excited to dismayed, then exasperated, the non-professional Jacques Gagnon exerts devoted commitment during the key sequences where a crepuscular snowscape unremittingly precipitates viewers' body temperate to slump with the characters on the screen when riding through the rigors of a wintry night, during which, a snowfield face-off between Benoit and the old soak Antoine lets the emotional punch kick in, a lifetime of disappointment is encapsulated by Duceppe's drunkard hurling, especially when it is closely followed by what is happening inside Cécile's cozy boudoir, life is never fair and it is a miracle how can we not all succumb to be cynical and misanthropic after being buffeted by the bread-and-butter blues.

That is the damning feeling encircles Jutra's unflinching realism-inflected enterprise, it is boldly unsentimental, but also alarmingly despondent, that's how it reaches the finish-line, whatever Benoit sees through the windowpane, real or fanciful, this Bildungsroman of an impressionable boy can only descend further into uninviting harshness, much as the film's natural backdrop, MON ONCLE ANTOINE is more congenitally formidable than heartfelt compelling, but that's also where lies its enduring strength!

I saw this film when it first came out and have never forgotten it. My Uncle Antoine is much, much greater than the sum of it's parts. The movie, loosely, is about a pre-adolescent who is sent to live with a relative in a small town in Canada. There are adventures that seem more or less typical but underneath there is a current building. MUA has a leisurely pace but have patience, the reward is coming. I believe the film was sub-titled and as with all non-English speaking movies I've seen it is well worth avoiding any dubbed version. Inevitably dubbed movies reflect the attitudes of a new director and actors, with the additional necessity of lip-synching lines that don't quite fit. The English speaking Amarcord is a travesty, for example, while the sub-titled version sings. My Uncle Antoine is well worth the time to find and watch it in French.

Don't be fooled by the nostalgic aura that surrounds "Mon oncle Antoine," because like the best of Canadian films darkness lurks just below the surface.

Set presumably in 1940s rural Quebec, the story explores the developing consciousness of young Benoit as he learns to deal with both sexuality and death.

The look of the film is astonishing, especially seeing as a high proportion of criticism towards Canadian cinema by the general public surrounds aesthetics. Beyond this, the unassuming Benoit is a seductive protagonist for the audience, looking at his corrupting community with fresh an innocent eyes.

I recommend reading Jim Leach's critical essay on the film in Canada's Best Features for anyone looking to place the film into a historical context while also dissecting the form of the film. Definitely check this one out.