Mon Oncle Antoine: The Criterion Collection (DVD)

Synopsis

Claude Jutra's evocative portrait of a boy's coming of age in wintry 1940s rural Quebec has been consistently cited by critics and scholars as the greatest Canadian film of all time. Delicate, naturalistic, and tinged with a striking mix of nostalgia and menace, Mon oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine) follows Benoit, as he first encounters the twin terrors of sex and death, and his fellow villagers, who are living under the thumb of the local asbestos mine owner. Set during one ominous Christmas, Mon oncle Antoine is a holiday film unlike any other, and an authentically detailed illustration of childhood’s twilight.

Here is a bittersweet slice-of-life comedy, as directed by Claude Jutra. Orphaned 14-year-old Benoit (Jacques Gagnon) comes to live with a foster family in a Canadian mining village in the 1940s - his Aunt Cecile and Uncle Antoine run a general store, and Antoine also serves as the local undertaker. Their Christmas celebrations are interrupted by news of the death of a boy at a distant home, which brings Antoine and Benoit out in a sleigh with a casket to retrieve the body. But the casket and corpse are lost in an accident caused by Antoine's drinking.

Screenwriter Clement Perron, who grew up in a French-Canadian village, writes from experience with a poet's delicacy and sensitivity, and director Jutra (who also plays Cecile's lover in the film) has masterfully captured the comical foibles and small and large heartbreaks of his subjects. And Gagnon gives a hauntingly realistic portrayal of an innocent discovering life's funny and tragic turns. -Bruce Eder