Don't know enough about Canadian cinema to agree or disagree with the Sight And Sound folks that this is the greatest film in that country's history. I will say, however, that, for those of you who enjoy your Christmas movies on the dark and bleak side (I know I do), you will be as happy as Mr. Potter in Pottersville with this offering from Claude Jutra, himself a rather dark and bleak figure in Canada's cinematic community, sorta like Woody Allen, once revered, now reviled. Aside from powerful and relentless anti sentimentality, another large virtue of this curdled, twisted holiday coming of age movie is Jutra's camera which, without overdoing it (i.e. Focusing too much on landscape rather than people), manages to plunge the viewer into a cheerless, asbestos mining town in the wilds of rural, wintertime Quebec. And while most of the images are stark some are inadvertently beautiful like the scene where the title character and his adopted kid pull up in their buggy to a farmhouse in the snow just at twilight. It's like a Wyeth painting come to life. And to the force of Jutra's cinematography you can add the excellence of all the actors, a gallery of Canucks of whom I've not heard, who deliver expert takes on betrayal, sensitivity, callousness, joy and anger. And for those of you who demand it there is a thin ray of hope at the end although, to my thinking, it's pretty darn emaciated.
Any knocks? A couple. My biggest complaints are, as usual, centered in the story dept. Simply put, Jutra fails to splice together his two stories, that of Antoine and Benoit and that of the working class family whose dad has a way of periodically running out on them. Instead, Jutra spends almost all of the first half of the film on Antoine's domestic life and the running of the general store while the runaway dad is offscreen in a logging camp and the eldest son, a character Jutra does not bother to explore at all, suddenly dies. This, of course, results in a second half which is less compelling for me than it should have been simply because I did not feel I knew the grieving family well enough to fully empathize. My other big gripe is that Jutra seems to be overdoing it with the life lessons that young Benoit has learned by film's end. Let's see now you've got death, infidelity, misery, deceit, and weakness. Any one of that list would prove more than adequate for a coming of age story. Dumping all of them on poor Benoit (and the viewer) ensures that the film will give a too superficial examination of each.
Bottom Line: Boy, am I glad I grew up in LA rather than an asbestos mining town in Quebec! Give it a B.
Any knocks? A couple. My biggest complaints are, as usual, centered in the story dept. Simply put, Jutra fails to splice together his two stories, that of Antoine and Benoit and that of the working class family whose dad has a way of periodically running out on them. Instead, Jutra spends almost all of the first half of the film on Antoine's domestic life and the running of the general store while the runaway dad is offscreen in a logging camp and the eldest son, a character Jutra does not bother to explore at all, suddenly dies. This, of course, results in a second half which is less compelling for me than it should have been simply because I did not feel I knew the grieving family well enough to fully empathize. My other big gripe is that Jutra seems to be overdoing it with the life lessons that young Benoit has learned by film's end. Let's see now you've got death, infidelity, misery, deceit, and weakness. Any one of that list would prove more than adequate for a coming of age story. Dumping all of them on poor Benoit (and the viewer) ensures that the film will give a too superficial examination of each.
Bottom Line: Boy, am I glad I grew up in LA rather than an asbestos mining town in Quebec! Give it a B.