Filming in Poetry

At the movie’s climax, an inebriated Antoine falls asleep while driving the sleigh bearing the dead boy’s coffin, and Benoît, seizing the reins, embarks on a joyride through the moonlit woods. As in the earlier sleigh scene with the mining boss, the episode begins in enchantment as the horse races through the snow, but the tone shifts as Benoît’s recklessness causes the coffin to slip off onto the snow and his uncle is too drunk to help him retrieve it. By the time Benoît and Fernand return the next day, the mourning family has found the coffin, taken it home, and gathered around it. This time it’s Benoît, standing outside the window, who meets the accusing glare of the dead boy’s mother; it’s he who has committed a sin for which others judge him. Jutra’s combination of sympathy for the boy and unrelenting toughness is, finally, what sets Mon oncle Antoine apart from The 400 Blows, which is bathed in a more sentimental light.

Other facets of the Québécois culture that Jutra renders in such poignant detail in Mon oncle Antoine show up in Kamouraska, his adaptation of Anne Hébert’s bestselling novel. Jutra had his heartaches with the 1973 release of this picture, not only because it didn’t achieve the critical and popular success it deserved, but also because his French producer (it was a co-production of Canada and France) demanded that Jutra edit down to two hours what, with its involved plot and complicated flashback structure, the director had always planned as a three-hour picture. The last-minute cutting worked against him; the 173- minute director’s cut, which he got the opportunity to prepare a decade later, reveals the full weight of the narrative. But even the original version is glorious enough, with its superb performances and its portrait of a repressive society that is both Victorian and Catholic, with sensual impulses that keep bursting through formal surfaces — sometimes comically, sometimes tragically.

Geneviève Bujold plays Elisabeth, who marries the seigneur of Kamouraska, Antoine Tassy, then discovers he’s a moody drunkard and a whoremonger. She begins an affair with an American doctor, George Nelson, who kills Antoine and flees to the United States. She tries to follow him but is detained at the border, sent to trial as an accessory, and finally released for the sake of appearances; she is, after all, an aristocrat. But she never really goes free: she’s incarcerated in the smothering propriety of a loveless second marriage. Hébert’s plot has obvious connections to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, while both the male characters — the tormented Antoine and the sexually powerful Nelson, whose passion for Elisabeth is coupled with disgust — remind one of Dostoevsky. But the movie’s delving into the nature of temptation and sin is essentially Catholic, and perhaps no other movie out of Quebec has ever been as daring in its exploration of the effects of French Catholicism on the sexual lives of the characters.

It’s sad that Jutra’s images are now undervalued and hard to access. Mon oncle Antoine is the only one of his features accessible on dvd. The videotapes of À tout prendre and Kamouraska have long been out of print, and they were never available with English subtitles. By Design never, to my knowledge, even came out on tape. It would be a fitting tribute to Canada’s greatest filmmaker if, two decades after his untimely passing, his reputation were restored and his movies returned to the film-loving audience for whom he intended them, and of whom he was himself a vital member.