When Kamouraska, his 1973 followup to Mon oncle Antoine, failed to catch fire even in Quebec and the filmmaking industry stalled there in the midseventies, Jutra accepted an invitation to work at the cbc and moved to Toronto. Cut off from his true creative source, the culture of his home province, his work stagnated. He did make one marvellous sexual comedy in 1981, the spirited, idiosyncratic By Design (which he shot in Vancouver), about a lesbian couple’s efforts to have a child, but with few exceptions it received mean, dismissive reviews. And there were moments in his final feature, La Dame en couleurs, made in Montreal and also about children, which suggested the imaginative spark that had ignited Mon oncle Antoine. But by the time he died, he had long since ceased to be spoken of as a brilliant filmmaker. The sad, lurid details of his death — stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s he disappeared, and it wasn’t until his body washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence the following April that suspicions were confirmed that he’d killed himself — upstaged the glory of his artistic achievements.
Any filmmaker who brings to mind De Sica and Ray — not to mention Jean Renoir, whose wide, democratic vision, unmediated compassion, and tonal complexity are obvious touchstones for both Mon oncle Antoine and Kamouraska — must be thought of as classical. But it’s a strange description for Jutra, who had a natural bent for the unorthodox. At eighteen he won a Canadian Film Award for his experimental short, Mouvement perpétuel, an accomplishment that eventually landed him a job at the National Film Board, where he worked on and off from 1953 until the release of Mon oncle Antoine (produced by the nfb). There could probably have been no better training for a burgeoning filmmaker, and Jutra’s mentor was the nfb’s prize animator, Norman McLaren, fabled for his quirkiness and wit. Their 1957 collaboration, the nine-minute short A Chairy Tale, features Jutra himself as a man who must coax a chair into letting him sit down. The film, a comic pas de deux for flesh and wood, suggests both Chagall and Buster Keaton, and you can see how Jutra incorporated the same light, dry humour — whimsy without affectation — in later movies as disparate as his first feature, À tout prendre, and his penultimate fulllength film, By Design.
Mon oncle Antoine has most often been compared to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows — both portray early-adolescent protagonists contending with the alluring and upsetting realities of the adult world. Indeed, perhaps the most useful way to place Jutra’s aesthetic is within the French New Wave, of which Truffaut and Godard were the most famous proponents. In a sense, Jutra was Canada’s representative member of the New Wave, and his treatment at home, especially with regard to the stunningly underrated Kamouraska, partly reflects Québécois reluctance in the early seventies to see the value in belonging to a movement that was not distinctly theirs. It’s ironic that while European filmmaking helped to bring American movies to a new maturity in the late sixties and early seventies (especially in the work of Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese), in the same era in Quebec, where politics trumped art, the honour of belonging to a world community of great artists had little cachet. Nonetheless, Jutra happily absorbed the influence of Truffaut and Godard, just as earlier he’d worshipped Federico Fellini. Jutra went to France and hung out with the New Wave directors, and travelled to Africa to collaborate with the most unconventional of them, the filmmaker- anthropologist Jean Rouch. When he returned to make his first feature, À tout prendre (1963), he was fully one of their number.
À tout prendre is a kind of diary on film focused on the vicissitudes of a young man’s sexual life. The New Wave’s most fervent Italian counterpart, Bernardo Bertolucci, who was about to make his own autobiographical breakthrough picture, Before the Revolution, adored it, praising Jutra for filming in poetry rather than prose. Jutra’s movie was even more personal than Bertolucci’s: he played the hero, Claude, and cast his friends. À tout prendre transforms youthful bravado and exuberance into lyricism. It draws on the vocabulary of the New Wave — jump cuts, leaping continuity, the playful use of text and soundtrack — and like Breathless or Shoot the Piano Player, it feels utterly unfettered, as if the thoughts and impulses of the filmmaker could be expressed as directly through camera and editing as a writer’s can be through the pen. In one scene, Claude watches, rapt, as a gorgeous black woman sways to the music at a party in someone’s apartment. Her silhouetted image could be the romantic fantasy of every young bachelor, presented in all its imaginative purity.
À tout prendre has more of Godard in it — the Godard not only of Breathless, but of Band of Outsiders and Masculine Feminine, his rites-of-courtship movies — than anything else Jutra made. He’s more firmly in Truffaut territory in Mon oncle Antoine and also in Kamouraska, a film set in 1830s rural Quebec that is akin to Truffaut’s romantic costume drama, The Story of Adèle H. Mon oncle Antoine is a period film, too — it’s based on screenwriter Clément Perron’s reminiscences of his childhood in an asbestos mining town in southwestern Quebec in the late 1940s, and in its depiction of an insular, distinctive, and economically disadvantaged culture it’s comparable to Pather Panchali, the first film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy.
But it’s the distinctive Québécois culture that also makes Antoine one of a kind. Jutra wasn’t a political filmmaker, but in its understated way the film addresses the deep-seated tensions between the underpaid French miners and the English bosses. No one who has seen Antoine is likely to have forgotten the scene where the mining boss rides through the streets of the town, scattering holiday trinkets for the children. At first this seems like a magical image, but the context alters it — once again this year the miners have received no Christmas bonus. The adults retreat behind closed doors, torn between their pride and resentment at their employer’s cheap attempt to play the role of benefactor and their reluctance to deny their kids the treats he’s thrown them. The children, sensitive to their parents’ unspoken feelings, are uncertain how to respond. Some of the younger ones run to pick up the presents; others — the teenagers — finger them uneasily. The glittering baubles suddenly look chintzy.
Visually, Jutra builds Mon oncle Antoine on a trio of linked motifs. One is Christmas, presented as simultaneously jubilant and bitter. The protagonist, Benoît, works for his uncle, who runs the town general store and funeral parlour, and while schoolchildren wrestle in the snow and lob snowballs, a crowd gathers outside Antoine’s store for the unveiling of the crèche in the window. On the other hand there is the tight-fisted boss and the Christmas Eve death of a boy for whom Antoine furnishes a coffin, rigging a horse and sleigh to make a late-night call to the boy’s grieving mother with Benoît at his side. She feeds them supper, but Benoît is too unsettled to eat; he’s mesmerized by the slightly open door behind which lurks the corpse of a boy his own age.
In this picture, the secrets of the adult world always hover behind doors left temptingly — or frighteningly — ajar. Benoît watches the local priest steal a swig of sacramental wine, the notary’s buxom wife try on a new girdle in the store, and catches his Aunt Cécile with Antoine’s assistant, Fernand (played by Jutra himself). The third motif involves what the boy sees behind glass, which serves the double purpose of allowing him to peek in and of reminding us of the division between him and whatever he’s watching. The adolescent Benoît is quick to judge the adults for their shortcomings: Antoine for his drunken ineptitude, Cécile and Fernand for their sexual indiscretion.
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