The Great Movies III

Benoit regards him through the panes, silently. Benoit sees everything, is solemn and quiet, except with his pals or Carmen, when he is a playful boy. During this day, there will be great drama attending the unveiling of the nativity scene in the store window. Enormous excitement when Alexandrine, the accountant's wife, goes upstairs with Cecile to try on a corset. Jollity as Antoine sells an old rummy a pair of pants twice too large for him. Celebration when a young woman shyly asks to see a bridal veil. Discovery when Benoit and Carmen wrestle upstairs, he grabs her breast through her dress, she stays perfectly still, and a wordless communication passes between them.

Outside on the main street, the sour-faced, hated mine owner trots in his carriage, tossing cheap Christmas stockings at the homes of his employees. Is it an accident they mostly land in the mud? The subtext of the film is that these mine workers are all treated as serfs and are working at a deadly trade. Jutra's film was made at the height of Quebec separatism, and although it is never specific in its politics, of course they are unmistakable.

There are small human scenes. A little flirtation between Antoine and Cecile. Another little flirtation between Cecile and Fernand. Benoit's infatuation with Carmen. Carmen's sadness when her father appears to collect her wages and doesn't even wish her a merry Christmas. The ferocity with which Antoine withholds s5 for Carmen herself: "That's how it is!"

We have seen scenes at the rural home of the Paulin family and know that the eldest son is ill. The store's telephone rings, and it is Madame Paulin (Helene Loiselle), telephoning to say that her son has died. Can Antoine come to take the body? Now begins the great sequence of the film that carries all its meaning and pays off on all its implications. Benoit begs to be allowed to go along with his uncle on the carriage ride through a developing blizzard, and they head out to the Paulin home, Antoine drinking steadily. Not to fear: the horse knows the way.

This journey certainly looks like the real thing, the windblown snow cutting into their faces as they huddle in their winter fur coats. At the lonely Paulin home, Benoit as usual sees all, says nothing, as Antoine, now thoroughly drunk, uses his fingers to eat the hot meal Madame Paulin has prepared. Benoit's eyes are drawn to a corner of the room where a dark doorway stands partly open. In there, he knows, is the dead boy, scarcely older than himself.

On the journey home, the coffin is lost: it falls from the carriage bed. Antoine is too drunk to help Benoit drag it back on board and suddenly unburdens himself of a lifetime of grief: he hates the country, is afraid of corpses, his wife never gave him a child. Benoit sees how it really is, and the lessons will continue during this evening. The emergency is entirely in his hands. What he does is inevitable and responsible and leads to a heartbreaking conclusion, once again witnessed through a window with Benoit's solemn eyes.

That Mon OncleAntoine is such a fine film only underlines the tragedy of the director's later life. Jutra had started full of promise. He first studied medicine, then became a student at the National Film Board of Canada (which produced this film). He worked in France as an apprentice to Truffaut. He worked with a script by Clement Perron, who was inspired by events in his own life. Jutra made other films before learning he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. He disappeared in the winter of 1986, and his body was found in the St. Lawrence River the next spring. He was presumably a suicide. He made an earlier film in which the character leaps into the same river.

What he left behind is a film to treasure, not least because of the way it uses its locations. The slag heaps of the mines overshadow the town below, and there is a high-angle shot establishing how vast they are and how small the town is just a few square blocks and muddy streets. It must still have been thus when he filmed. The storefronts and interiors do not look like sets-not even the store, although we know it surely is. There is not an automobile in sight, nor would one have gotten far on these roads in the winter. The faces of many of the extras betray a heavy load of work and disappointment. Social commentary is buried all through the film, as in the contrast between the working women and the haughty wife of the mine accountant.