Word: jutra
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Directed by CLAUDE JUTRA...
...revelation. So it is in My Uncle Antoine, an earthy, substantial Canadian movie about a few days in the life of a lad called Benoit. The setting is contemporary-a small mining town in Quebec-but there is an appropriate aura of timelessness about it. Director Claude Jutra (Take It All) approaches the excellent Clement Perron screenplay with such intuition and insight that he manages to make Benoit's initiation at once universal and unique...
Benoit's Uncle Antoine runs the general store in Black Lake, a perfect place for a growing boy to get his first intimations of adulthood. The store, as Jutra and Perron present it, is a microcosm, a clearing place for the stuff of life, from wedding veils to coffins...
Playing opposite her, Jutra outdoes himself in celebrating the girl's dusky feline beauty. Johanne meets him, moves in with him, gets pregnant by him, narrowly averts "a $200 operation" before he goes away and leaves her. Though intrinsically commonplace, their affair is cinematically modish, caught by cameramen who appear to shoot from the hip, doting on closeups, picking up lots of outdoor mist and indoor cigarette smoke at unexpected angles...
Already showered with avant-garde kudos, Take It All seems to be based on the assumption that a very personal movie will be automatically honest, alive and exciting. Instead, Jutra's wordy confessional sounds as though something may have been lost by rendering it into English, and often looks like a smattering of Jean-Luc Godard uneasily combined with the self-absorption of Fellini's 8½ or the glib self-exposure of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. "I wish only to move, surprise, provoke," Jutra has written. "The important thing in life is to have...