# Mon oncle Antoine (1971)

### reviewed by
David Dalgleish

    MON ONCLE ANTOINE (1971)

"I'm not made for the country. I hate it here."

    3.5 out of ****

    Starring Jacques Gagnon, Jean Duceppe, Olivette Thibault, Lyne
    Champagne
    Directed by Claude Jutra
    Written by Jutra & Clément Perron
    Cinematography by Michel Brault

Claude Jutra does two things with great assurance and subtlety in MON ONCLE ANTOINE ("My Uncle Antoine"). First, he captures the essence of a place, a people, and a time. Second, he tells the story of a young boy's rite-of-passage. If Jutra did one of these things well, this would be a good movie; because he does both, it is great.

The place is a small asbestos mining community in Quebec; the people are the insular, Catholic townsfolk; and the time is Christmas, sometime in the 1940s, before the Quiet Revolution urbanized and secularized the province. Place, people, and time are lovingly observed: there is not a moment in this film which does not seem authentic. The cold, stark winter landscape is captured in all its austere beauty by Michel Brault, while the naturally lit interiors are cluttered and shadowy and everyday, filling the frame with a sense of real places and real lives. There is a strong sense of community: these people have only each other, and Jutra conveys all the joys and frustrations of this way of life. This is a cinematic postcard, a memento of a place which no longer exists as it once did.

The principal players are Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and his nephew Benoit (Jacques Gagnon). Antoine should, in theory, be the grand patriarch of this town. He owns the general store--the community's heart--and he is also the undertaker, responsible for bringing the dead to church for last rites. But it is his wife (Olivette Thibault) who really runs the store, with the aid of the clerk (Jutra) and the two adolescents who live and work there: Benoit and Carmen (Lyne Champagne). Antoine mostly sits about lazily, drinking heavily; we realize he is living one of Thoreau's lives of quiet desperation.

As the title suggests, the crucial moments of MON ONCLE ANTOINE are seen through Benoit's eyes: the story is in his changing awareness of his uncle and of nubile Carmen, his growth into maturity, into a newfound awareness of mortality and sexuality, death and desire: the two issues which separate adulthood from childhood. There is one scene which is absolutely perfect. Benoit and Antoine go to a rural house, where the eldest son has just died, to bring the body back to town; they are given a meal for their trouble by the grieving mother. The way Jutra handles this entire scene is virtuosic: his camera captures the emotions of the mother, the surviving children, Benoit and his uncle, with economy and accuracy and insight. This is cinema at its most accomplished, conveying with images and sparse dialogue all the complexity and emotional texture of a great novel.

Most of the film approaches this level of mastery, but not all: it drags on perhaps 15 minutes too long, and there is one tedious, predictable scene in which Benoit and another boy, fascinated by women and clueless about them, nervously spy on an older woman as she strips. I've seen variants on this scene many times, and considering how well Jutra elsewhere handles Benoit's growing sexual self-consciousness, here it is irrelevant. But this is an exception: what is remarkable is that Jutra manages to avoid cliché, making this timeworn material seem new and even profound, in its own deceptively simple way.

MON ONCLE ANTOINE has twice been voted the greatest ever Canadian film, in Canada's version of the once-a-decade Sight & Sound poll. This in part reflects the feebleness of the Canadian film industry and the resulting paucity of great Canadian movies, but it also reflects the quintessential Canadian-ness of the film, which in its quiet, understated examination of small-town life resembles Canadian literary classics like Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Its ambitions are modest, but it more than succeeds in what it sets out to do. It is also quintessentially Canadian in that it could have been a little less restrained, and a little more ambitious.

            A Review by David Dalgleish (February 26/98)

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