Word: jutra
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...experience. My Uncle Antoine takes an anti-English stance, founded in economics not in race, when it depicts an asbestos mine near Black Lake, Quebec, where the managers are English and deliver their rebukes to the French-speaking workers in a language the workers cannot understand. At Christmas time, Jutra shows the villagers' holiday frivolity instantly transformed by the mine owner's two-faced distribution of little bags of candy, which he throws from his horse-drawn sleigh to the children of the same Black Lake workers he holds impoverished...
...economic condition of the town's residents is the backdrop for the film. Jutra makes his sympathies clear in a few scattered scenes, but he is mainly interested in the personal relations which the economics lie behind. The film's secondary plot takes up the life of Joe Poulin (Lionel Villeneuve), worker at the asbestos mine, who can take the tension and degradation of his job no longer. He quits, and soon sets out for his old job at a lumber camp. Facing nature alone, unfettered by machinery, he will lead, a romantic spirit would suggest, the rustic existence...
...Jutra is creating a mythic figure here, and he gives his mythology the distance it needs to appear large. He makes this backwoodsman a regional folk hero, but at the same time he shows, from a distance, the conditions that forced the man to leave a large family in need of a father. Underneath the surface dignity of a Paul Bunyan figure we see the desperate position of an impoverished man. The irony of this situation depends on the objective and unemotional tone the film has maintained up to this point. If we approached too close to Poulin, his mythical...
HAVING once established the conflicts that make up Poulin, Jutra is free to set the character aside. When the film was first released, many critics complained about this unusual procedure, saying Poulin should not figure so prominently near the beginning of the film since he is not a "major" character in any conventional sense. His presence is somewhat confusing, to be sure, because most of the film centers around Benoit's experiences as a stock boy in his uncle's general store. But Poulin returns at the very end of the film, mourning over his dead son, and his presence...
...BULK of the film is both lively and straightforward. Scenes of Benoit's often playful, often serious life at the general store (where Jutra himself plays another worker), the warm portraits of Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and Aunt Cecile (Olivette Thibault) drinking together--these could be excised and shown separately and would still be sensitive scenes. But a film made of these scenes would be one-sided, and this film is not. The gentleness of the store contrasts with Benoit's harsh winter ride with Antoine on an undertaking job far from the town. Antoine's jovial drinking in his store...