This Canadian coming-of-age tale is a magnificent example of how powerful a "small" character piece can be. Young Benoit (Jacques Gagnon, an amateur whose expressive face could put many a more-established actor to shame) lives with his uncle and aunt (Jean Duceppe and Olivette Thibault) in a tiny village in which the primary employment opportunity is mining asbestos. Over the course of a deceptively low key Christmas Eve and Day in the early 1940s, everything Benoit thinks he knows about his small world will be turned on its ear and he will become a man. There is possibly no way to do justice (at least for me) to the precision and delicacy with which the director Claude Jutra infuses the humdrum of day-to-day life. So much happens, and yet it could be argued that "nothing" really happens. In reality, Life happens. While some events are more dramatic and life-changing than others, most everything is given its full due, presented with perceptive grace. (A small barrel of nails taking up precious walking space in the general store that Benoit's relatives own—his uncle is also the town undertaker-- is just as prominent a storyline as some of the more devastating turns of events—and when it is finally picked up to be put away, the film gets its biggest laugh by having the young man carrying it still lift his leg high to step over it.) Jutra isn't afraid to take his time and thoroughly investigate all aspects of life in this depressing little town; the primary foci are on sex and death—about which Benoit will learn much, though he can't make sense of all of it. What's most amazing about Mon oncle Antoine isn't that it's unlike anything we've seen before, but that it shows us the utterly familiar and universal moments of life and makes us see them with a depth we're unused to. But what I've never seen anything like in any movie is an astonishing scene between Benoit and Carmen (Lyne Champagne, another emotive amateur), the young store clerk who his uncle and aunt have basically bought from her poor father. Upstairs in the storeroom of the store, Benoit and Carmen flirt and chase each other among the caskets, she in the bridal veil a customer waits for downstairs. They end up falling to the floor, and he puts his hand matter-of-factly on her breast. She turns away, crying, and flees; Benoit, shaken, lies down on the floor and realizes they've been observed by the store's chief clerk Fernand (played by Jutra himself). It is a simple, but almost staggering scene of such allusive beauty, with both characters caught up in a moment they can't quite make sense of. And the "sex and death" metaphor is unstressed, allowing us to try and comprehend all the subtext without a lot of editorializing. It is in the last third of the movie, though, that Jutra brings all his themes together. A young boy has died suddenly, and Antoine has to drive hours away through the snow on a horse-drawn carriage to retrieve the body. Benoit begs Aunt Cecile to let him go (Uncle Antoine warns him, "Don't get all excited"), and the literal journey to manhood begins. But Jutra never bogs the journey down, full as it is, with the weight of self-importance; we watch what happens, we process what it means to Benoit, and we are allowed to make sense of it on our own. Jutra stresses nothing, he just shows it. (Benoit has a moment when he has to touch the dead boy's body. He hesitates for a moment, and suddenly takes hold, and I thought, "I've just watched a boy become a man, right this second." His nascent maturity allows Benoit to react as he does when the trip back home—and the arrival at home, as well—completely knock him out of the world he's known; he's angry, he's hurt, but he's not confused. He sees what's what, and accepts it for what it is. I wish I could say Antoine is perfect, because it comes awfully damn close. There is a really silly dream sequence near the end that takes all the allusion we've witnessed and makes it rather obvious, but this is about 90 seconds out of a movie, and—though disappointingly lumpy—can't undo everything Jutra has so phenomenally laid out before. This movie affected me as few movies have; certainly nothing this year (with more than a few really fine films) comes close. In stressing again how small it is (which, as I've stated more than a few times, is right up my alley, aesthetically), I attempt to not overhype it. It's tiny, but it is as powerful a movie as I've ever seen. **** and Most Highly Recommended
Review of My Uncle Antoine
