My local library in Charlottetown has, naturally, a media section consisting of many videos. For the most part, the videos are from the National Film Board of Canada, and are the sorts of things that you wouldn’t find at a regular video store. A lot of the materials are either documentaries or more explicitly educational in nature -- although there is the occasional genuine feature film, since the NFB has also funded Canadian feature films over the decades.

Whenever I think of the NFB myself, however, I really never think of it as a “film studio” in the conventional sense. Possibly this is because the NFB was responsible for all kinds of public service announcements and other educational shorts that used to take the place of normal commercials during TV programs on Canadian networks. You know, like great moments and/or people in Canadian history, or the Hinterland’s Who’s Who segments in which we’d get the lowdown on a particular animal in the Canadian wilderness. It is true, however, that the NFB has funded many feature films that don’t necessarily have aspirations to be educational, although many viewers may think that it is.........

So that leads us to Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra’s 1971 film. This is generally considered one of the “great” Canadian films, alongside the equally groundbreaking Goin’ Down the Road (1970). Both of these films are well-regarded, I suppose, because they deal with rural Canada -- something that hadn’t really been depicted in high profile feature films before. Goin’ Down the Road is about two people from Nova Scotia who think that they can find success in the big city of Toronto, but find that they are making a dismal failure of it. And Mon Oncle Antoine is even more encased in a rural landscape. I’m not sure when this story is supposed to have taken place (the credits merely say “A Quebec asbestos town not too long ago.”) but the village appears far removed from any major center like Montreal or Quebec City, in both distance and technology. I don’t think I’ve even seen one car -- or television -- in this movie! Although at least there are phones and electricity.

The story takes place in the few days before Christmas, but any Christmas cheer seems muted by the remoteness of this village and the aimless lives of its inhabitants. There are essentially two storylines that merge at a crucial point in the film. One involves one of the workers at the asbestos plant, who decides on a whim to take this job and shove it -- he says that he’s going to work out in the woods for the winter, because he won’t have to put up with any of the aggravations (including the English bosses) of the asbestos plant. But by traveling to the woods for the winter, this means separating from his family for a number of months. His final night with his wife is a mixture of sadness, affection, and an understanding of the fact that there really is no choice for a guy like him, or a family like this -- where else is this guy going to go for work? It’s either the asbestos plant, or nothing, unless you want to leave the village!

The main body of the movie, however, is about a young kid and his coming-of-age, surrounded by his family and other associates, including the title character. His uncle Antoine runs the general store in town, and also is a part-time funeral director. In this family situation, the kid doesn’t live with his parents, but with his uncle and aunt. As well, there’s also a young girl, who the uncle and aunt have “adopted” for a somewhat unspecified reason. There’s also a clerk named Fernand (played by director Jutra) who figures in this scenario as well.

The actor who plays the kid has a naturally mischievous look (perhaps much like Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows), and, being a young kid, isn’t quite attuned to the more complex nature, and the shades of gray, of the adult world. For the first part of the film, the kid doesn’t take anything seriously. He hangs out with his uncle and Fernand during the funeral activities, and doesn’t quite grasp the coldness and finality of death (although Fernand’s own antics certainly don’t help a whole lot, and Antoine himself, befitting a funeral director, even part-time, is also rather detached from the seriousness of death.). The kid ransacks the communion wafers and wine from the church. He sneaks upstairs at the general store to watch a much-gossiped about woman try on a new outfit she plans to purchase -- in hopes that he can get a glance of some naked skin. He flings snowballs at the asbestos boss’s horse and sled as it rides through the village. Overall, being a young kid, his own sense of childhood overrides the fact that this village is such a depressing place........

*Big Spoiler Alert*

But then something happens which triggers something in the kid -- something that shows him that the real world is far more despairing than he has a right to know at his age. A child -- in fact the child of the guy who quit the asbestos plant earlier in the film -- dies of an illness on Christmas Eve, and Antoine has to take the horse and sled out to the country. The kid wants to tag along, as usual. But once he arrives at the house, the kid begins to really see what is going on. This isn’t just a situation involving a traditional funeral, and the usual customs -- this is an actual family, dealing with the fact that a kid -- about the same age as our young protagonist -- has just died and is still laid out in his bedroom. The mother of this child tries to compose herself, but occasionally breaks down. All this while the uncle carries on with his superficial caring attitude, while taking advantage of the woman’s kind offering of a meal and (especially) drink.

And the kid soon sees how pathetic some of the members of his family and inner circle really are. His uncle is completely intoxicated by the time he and the kid haul the body, inside a wooden coffin, onto the sled, and during the ride, the coffin falls out of the sled. This results in a confrontation between the kid and his uncle, in which the uncle, in a drunken haze, expresses how miserable he really thinks his life is. Once the kid returns home, he starts to understand that everything -- even the seemingly normalcy of his family -- is not what it always appeared to be in his eyes.

Mon Oncle Antoine does have some humor in it, mostly deriving from the kid’s antics, but also just from a few snatches of incident and dialogue. But the overall feeling is grim and sour and depressing -- as the movie quietly, peacefully, paces to its conclusion, things get more gloomy, and the movie doesn’t seem to have a way out. For my money, I’d say the only way out of this situation is death -- I kind of wondered while thinking about the death of the child if perhaps that was Jutra’s sneaky way of saying that death would be a relief from this burden of living in such a poor, gloomy environment. Certainly, that child’s father couldn’t get out of his situation just by quitting his job and going to the forest to work -- he quits that job soon after, since it obviously isn’t any better working amongst trees, in the middle of nowhere, and nowhere near your family, than it is working in a dirty asbestos plant. These people have nowhere to go!

The filmmaking is very effective. There’s nothing obviously sensational about it; it clearly is under the NFB documentary influence, as it’s shot on the cheap, and the camerawork gives that docudrama kind of feel. But that all helps the movie -- it gives a bit of life to this slow, somber, and depressing movie. The movie feels gritty and authentic -- there doesn’t seem to be a single thing that is fake about it. The location is about as remote as you can get without completely leaving civilization.

I don’t expect that a lot of people would care much about this movie. For one thing, most Canadians don’t care about Canadian movies, especially one of this vintage. And the movie is pretty grim stuff, even as it’s far from “shocking”, and the drama is far from being overdone or overplayed. And like many French films, it’s a lot more introspective, quiet, and passive about the story events than some viewers would want. Nevertheless, Mon Oncle Antoine is a strong effort, and is surely a piece of Canadian film history.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day