End of Innocence

By JAY COCKS

MY UNCLE ANTOINE

Directed by CLAUDE JUTRA

Screenplay by CLEMENT PERRON

Worn by repetition, the story of how a boy becomes a man can still be a 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.

Uncle Antoine mostly drinks and gossips with his cronies while his wife and his clerk attend to the business. It is the Christmas season, Benoit conducts a flirtation with a young salesgirl, and there is promise of festivity. Villagers gather in front of the store to watch the display window being ceremonially unveiled as if it held half the world's treasure. It seems, at first, an innocent time.

Then the eldest son of a mineworker dies suddenly on a farm far from the village. Benoit and his uncle must make the long trip by sleigh to bring the boy's body back to town. Antoine falls into a drunken stupor on the journey home ward, and the unguarded coffin slides into the snow from the back of the sleigh. Benoit, unable to rouse his uncle, rides to Black Lake for help and finds his aunt enjoying her own Christmas party in bed with the clerk.

Director Jutra's attention wavers for a while between Benoit and the family of the deceased boy, and as a consequence the film becomes slightly un raveled before it reaches its climax. The movie is also overrich in incidents, since Jutra and Perron are too anxious to cram everything in. There is an excess of vivid but extraneous vignettes of village life, like the Christmas sleigh ride of the dour mineowner distributing stockings full of cheap candy to the poor children along the main street. Yet in spite of its unfixed perspective, My Uncle Antoine is indelible, the best chronicle of a coming of age since Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

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