The Brain Game

MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE Directed by Alain Resnais Screenplay by Jean Gruault

All right, class, settle down. Today, for our course on human behavior, we are pleased to have three distinguished guests who will present a lecture and demonstration on the way man's brain determines man's actions. The seminar will be led by Dr. Henri Laborit, the Paris physician and biologist who has documented the source of aggression in all mammals--from white rats up through the most sophisticated human beings. To illustrate his thesis with scenes from the lives of three ordinary people, we have engaged the services of Jean Gruault, who has written some of the finest and most provocative French films of the past 20 years: Truffaut's Jules and Jim and The Wild Child; Godard's Les Carabiniers; and Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV. The slide show has been assembled by Alain Resnais, director of such films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and La Guerre Est Finie. Today's class will be a bit longer than usual, but I believe you will find the experience entertaining as well as instructive.

If every classroom lecture were as lucid and entertaining as Mon Oncle d'Amerique--and if every film were as witty and well crafted--our colleges would be filled with scholars and our movie theaters with works of art. What may look at first like a film experiment as dry as the dust on a neglected library shelf turns out to be a spectacular juggling act: of documentary and fiction, analysis and creativity, determinism and free will, comedy and tragedy, the past and the present. The three jugglers--Gruault, Resnais and Laborit--work in perfect sync, perhaps because their own pasts have prepared them for this challenge. Gruault's scripts have often described characters dominated by their emotions or by the whim of the historical moment. And nothing could be more natural than that Resnais, whose films have played with the real and imagined past in a medium that lives in the eternal present, should make a movie based on the work of a biologist who declares that "a living creature is a memory that acts."

Imbedded in the memory of every living thing, and reinforced from the earliest years by parental instruction and example, are the codes that determine how that creature will act. At birth, as a gift from the most primitive part of his brain, a child knows the elements of survival: he must eat, drink and reproduce. His early life is filled with the imposition of rituals: toilet training, religious instruction, social communication and compromise. By the time he is an adult, he knows most of the games people play: how to dress and cook, shake hands, argue with a colleague, plead with a lover, break things, break up, make up, attack, escape or withdraw. In each "free" action, he is replaying the history of the race as stage-managed by an eons-old brain that wants simply to survive and conquer.

The stage manager of Mon Oncle d'Amerique is Laborit himself. He provides the scientific narration and presides like a Shavian patriarch over the three fictional characters: Jean (Roger-Pierre), a director of the state radio network; Rene (Gerard Depardieu), a textile executive; and Janine (Nicole Garcia), an actress turned corporate troubleshooter who has an affair with Jean and business dealings with Rene. As the characters unfold their life stories--their ambitions and repressions, their wiles and quirks--a curious thing happens. They start slipping out of Laborit's behavioral noose. Sometimes they illustrate his thesis; sometimes they confute it. And Gruault and Resnais have fun acting as subversive intermediaries between the puppeteer and his willful marionettes.

As Jean, Janine and Rene come to life onscreen, they come to share many things: a childhood devotion to literature, a driving ambition, even a tendency to think, in times of crisis, of their favorite French movie stars. And each character muses about a legendary "uncle in America," who made a success of himself in the New World and hovers over them like a guardian angel. This uncle is the ideal parent, who gives them what they want and tells them what they want to hear. The movie star is the ideal self, who fights for what he wants and gets it. But the real world is never ideal. To grow up, they must kill their American uncles and actor icons; they must learn not to break Laborit's codes of behavior but to understand them. In the end, the good doctor wins.

As the characters conceal themselves in their codes and inhibitions, only to reveal themselves as we get to know them, so does the film. Resnais, a past master of cinematic sleight of hand, has often taken a story and stylized it, juxtaposed images, shuffled the sequence of tenses. He is an acute analyst of human behavior, an Henri Laborit of the cinema. Resnais begins Mon Oncle with a shot of what looks like a collage of 120 picture postcards; at the end of the film, when we see the collage again, we realize it comprises 120 scenes from the lives of our marionettes. A brief scene of tension--Jean leaving his wife, or Rene" sparring with a business competitor--will be repeated later in the film, from a different angle, or with the participants wearing the heads of laboratory rats as badges of their enslavement to the primitive brain. (Mon Oncle never makes the intellectual's mistake of taking itself too seriously.) The viewer is invited to identify with the characters, and then to step back and appraise. A second, implied invitation is just as clear: that the viewer step back from himself and take a long, cool look.

Resnais, Gruault and the trio of main actors (especially the radiant Nicole Garcia) bring to eccentric, amusing life both the theory and the characters. Every brief sequence in this film mosaic resonates with some lovely detail of personality or performance, of sound or image. The film's structure may be so complex that it demands more than one viewing, but any intelligent moviegoer should find enough explosive humor and pathos to keep him from running out to buy popcorn or a textbook. In its respect for the subject, the characters and the movie audience, Mon Oncle d'Amerique is by far the best film of the year.

--By Richard Corliss

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