MON ONCLE ANTOINE (70)

Directed by: Claude Jutra (1971)

Starring: Jacques Gagnon, Claude Jutra, Jean Duceppe, Olivette Thibault

The Pitch: Orphaned 15-year-old lives with his aunt and uncle - who runs the general store and also serves as the local undertaker - in a Canadian mining village in the 1940s.

Theo Sez: Rare to find a film that gets better as it goes along. Anyone leaving halfway through may struggle to work out why this is rapidly acquiring a reputation as the best Canadian film ever made - all a bit folksy, with the small-town rhythms and rather coy detail (priest taking a swig of Communion wine when he thinks nobody's looking, all the rubes gossiping and goggling when the notary's pretty young wife enters the room), and big-eyed young Gagnon taking it all in. Then the template starts to crack, prompted by the unforgettable extended set-piece of the cross-country trip to the dead boy's house and subsequent revelations, turning our hero's life upside down, ending with a genuinely odd and haunting dream sequence (merging sexual awakening with an awareness of Death, though also perhaps connecting to his own - presumably dead - mother) : turns out nobody is happy in this quiet little town, making for a film that grows in mystery and complexity with each shot. The key is perhaps the dead boy's family, led by the father who detests les Anglais and seems the only person in the movie who feels the social and ethnic tensions of the place (he's a minor character, yet Jutra starts and finishes with him) : the final shot is a bittersweet tableau, looking at an echt-Quebecois family, fiercely independent salt-of-the-earth - both the kid, watching from behind the glass, and his uncle Antoine are explicitly outsiders - yet they're gathered round an open coffin, led by a father who wants only to escape a dying way of life. Richer than it looks, sensitive but quirky, pessimistic as a whole yet delighting in the tiny details of human interaction ; Mme. Thibault seems a bit old for an object of lust, but maybe it's just that years of Hollywood-watching have dulled me to the charms of middle-aged sexuality...