Mon Oncle Antoine (Criterion Collection) [Import]

MON ONCLE ANTOINE is about rural life and the coming of age of a teenage boy whose uncle is an embalmer.Slow moving but immensely rewarding;one can feel the director's tenderness for his characters.The film can be hard to appreciate if you don't speak FRENCH or don't know much about the aspects of rural life in QUEBEC and it's mentality..JUTRA the director, plays a little part in the general store.JEAN DUCEPPE who plays ANTOINE was a very well known actor in QUEBEC;he formed his own theater company in 1973 ... Along the way,the teenage boy also makes his sexual awakening in a funny voyeurism scene in which some women comes to the general store to renew their wardrobes.The film remains the director's most acclaim work.JUTRA sadly died of the ALZHEIMER disease in 1986.

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

Mon Oncle Antoine is a film that has been regarded as the best Canadian film of all time. I can say it is one of the best I have seen also.

The film is directed by Claude Jutra and is about a teenage boy living in an asbestos mining town in rural Quebec during Christmas in the 1940's. He works for his uncle who is the town mortician. The film has great cimenatography and has some great scenes of the town.

The DVD has some good special features also on this double disc set.

Disc one contains the film with both the original French language track and an optional English dub, plus the theatrical trailer.

Disc two contains a 2007 documentary on the film's production, a 2002 biography of Claude Jutra, and "A Chairy Tale" a 1957 short film that Jutra co-directed with Norman McLaren. (This film is about a chair the moves around to avoid being sit on.)

This film is very good and I highly recommend it.

This film has consistently been voted as the greatest Canadian film ever made in various critics polls over the years. Revered New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael hailed it as a small masterpiece upon original release but it is the sort of slow, intimate, character-based drama that has never achieved the sort of wide appeal (outside of Canada) that more plot focused films have. Watching some of the supplementary material on the Criterion Collection disc, it is also clear that there are many cultural references in the film that will mean more to a Canadian (particularly a French Canadian) than to other viewers.

The film meanders amiably along, capturing in unhurried pace the life of rural 1940's Quebec, in this case an abestos mining town. The main characters are Benoit, an orphaned boy, the local undertaker Antoine and his assistant Fernand played by the director himself Claude Jutra.
Eventually the film reaches its big set-piece, a long, extended night sequence where Benoit and Antoine (covered in furs) must traverse the icy, snow covered landscape via sled to retrieve the body of a boy who has died at a farmhouse.

The director was hailed as the new savior of Canadian cinema at the time of release, but unfortunately never achieved the level of success later on that he did with this film. He mysteriously disappeared one winter and his body was discovered the following spring after the ice had thawed...a simple note attached, "My name is Claude Jutra".