Uncle Tony

I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to blog about two movies that TCM happens to be showing back to back. The second of those movies is Mon oncle Antoine, which will be on tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM.

The setting is a rural Quebec mining town in the mid-to-late 1940s. Quebec audiences of the time the movie was made (1971) would have understood a lot more about the social and cultural milieu in which the movie is set than modern audiences, especially Americans, although Mon oncle Antoine is a movie that's easy enough to enjoy even if you don't know any of this stuff; it just won't have quite so deep a meaning.

In that town Jos Poulin is the patriach of a family, working at the mine which was the major employer and economic engine of the area. But he pisses off the English-speaking boss, which causes him to quit his job and leave his family behind for a logging came where he's going to work over the winter.

Fast-forward to the Christmas season. Benoît (Jacques Gagnon), not one of the Poulins, is an adolescent boy whose parents have died and who lives with his uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and aunt Cécile (Olivette Thibault). They run the town's general store, which seems to be the only game in town. In addition, Antoine serves as the community's undertaker while Benoît is an altar boy at the local Catholic parish, in a time and place where the Church dominated social life. Benoît is growing up, and finding himself interested in women, notably young Carmen, who has been forced by circumstance to work at the general store just like Benoît has. There's also another adolescent boy who wants to watch a woman try on a corset and get Benoît to watch, too.

But the tone of the story really changes when Mme. Poulin, who lives out in the sticks even compared to the middle-of-nowhere town, tends to her sick eldest son Marcel on Christmas Eve. She discovers that Marcel isn't just sick, but he's died. So she calls Antoine, he being the undertaker, and asks him to fetch the body to prepare it for the funeral. Normally, Antoine would go with his assistant Fernand (Claude Jutra, who also directed) to fetch the body, but since Benoît is growing up, he wants to go along on the job.

It's Christmas Eve and a snowstorm picks up, making it difficult to get out to the Poulin place, especially since they go by horse-drawn cart, not being well enough off to have a hearse. Antoine keeps himself warm by drinking, and Benoît begins to realize that Antoine actually has a pretty severe drinking problem. It gets to the point that Anotine passes out from the drinking, and Benoît has to drive the horse back home. He pushes the horse to hard, and physics causes the coffin to fall off the back of the cart. Anotine is too passed out to help with picking up the coffin, and Benoît isn't strong enough to pick it up itself since there's a dead body inside. Worse, when Benoît gets back to the store, he walks in on Cécile and Fernand having an affair.

If that's all the movie was, Mon oncle Antoine wouldn't be a bad coming-of-age story. But there's also a substantial subtext, as I implied at the beginning. Back in the 1940s, English-speakers, especially in Montreal, were at the top of the economic class structure in the province (you may recall that several English-speaking Hollywood stars, including Glenn Ford and Norma Shearer, hail from the Montreal area). This explains the boss at the mine speaking English to the workers, and Jos commenting that he doesn't speak English. Politically, the province was dominated by a man named Maurice Duplessis (eagle-eyed viewers will notice the bathroom graffiti cursing Duplessis), who sided with business interests and was notoriously corrupt. He was also allied with the Church which, being the days before Vatican II, was very socially conservative.

There was a lot of chafing from the Francophone working class, although they were powerless to effect much change until the miners struck in the late 1940s, a move which drove a wedge between Duplessis and the Church. Duplessis would live and rule Quebec for another decade after that, and his death sparked what would become known as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which ultimate brought the idea of Quebec separatism and Francophone absolutism to the fore, at the extreme expense of anybody not a French speaker. (I have an acquaintance who's a member of Montreal's Italian community, who is seriously looking to join the exodus of non-Francophones out of the province one his children grow up, realizing that he's a second-class citizen.) This process was partly underway but by no means fully completed at the time of the making of Mon oncle Antoine, but as an outsider looking in it seems to me that the social changes of the early 1970s are clearly informing this view of the late 1940s.

In any case, Mon oncle Antoine is an excellent movie that should be easily understood even by those who aren't fans of foreign-language films, not being anything like the stereotype of a pretentious movie. It's one you absolutely should see if you get the chance.