About the WonderCafe Advent Calendar.

Today we’re going to get a little bit artsy as we look at a classic Quebecois film...

Mon Oncle Antoine

This 1971 NFB is film is hailed a triumph of French Canadian cinema, and rightly so. The truth is, you’re more apt to see it broadcast on television in Canada on Canada Day (or St. Jean Baptiste Day!) and yet it’s Christmas setting makes it well worth watching now.

Directed by Claude Jutra and written by Jutra and Clement Perron (who used his own experiences growing up for the script), Mon Oncle Antoine is a slice of life in a small community in the Asbestos region of Quebec in the Duplessis-era 1940s. There’s a the frustrated mine worker, Poulin, who gets sick of the English bosses and quits to go cut trees in the bush, leaving his wife and sons to tend the farm in his absence. There’s the local shopkeeper, Antoine, who also acts as the local undertaker: Antoine drinks a bit too much gin, enjoys gossiping with the locals, hates dealing with the dead and ignores the bookkeeper flirting with his wife. Antoine’s orphaned nephew, Benoit, and Carmen, the neighbor girl they’ve taken in, are two adolescents teetering on the brink of adulthood.

As Christmas approaches, the English mine boss pulls his sleigh through the village and indifferently throws candies on the stops of the unhappy employees homes. It’s a stunning scene-- as none of the mineworkers or their children leave the doorsteps, the decades of resentment evident on their faces. And in an instant it’s transformed by a well-shot snowball from Benoit. As Carmen looks at him with pride, it’s a moment of revolutionary triumph for Benoit.

Soon it’s the afternoon of Christmas Eve and the workers come to Antoine’s store to spend their paycheques on Christmas presents. All eyes are on the debut of the Christmas window of the shop. Then there’s gossiping, bartering, drinking, nubile women trying on clothes (and teenagers with Benoit spying on them), laughing and crying. And in the midst of this beautiful set of scenes that beautifully and unsentimentally recount time and place which no longer exists, there comes a phone call: Poulin’s oldest son, the 16 year-old which Poulin promised to send to school next year, is dead. Antoine takes Claude out through the snowy wastes to collect the body of Poulin’s teenager.

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Mon Oncle Antoine is a heady mixture of life, death, sex, longing, hopes, dreams and disappointments. And yet, while there is sad moments, it’s not a depressing movie at all. Part of the reason for that is Benoit, who provides the sort of terrible innocence that shows the absurdity in life--Benoit goes to church to be altar boy at mass and snacks on the communion wafer and wine before the service; afterward, he spies the priest having a tipple himself—and also its beauty, wonder and emotion. The closing scene of the film gives us the moment where Benoit becomes an adult, and yet it’s not through sex, like so many coming of age stories, but through a moment just as powerful.

Mon Oncle Antoine is a great film about the glorious, fragile, absurd ordinariness of the human condition. If it isn’t a film that’s watched at Christmas it ought to be.