MUBI

Director Claude Jutra examines life in a small Quebec town in this famed Canadian feature, about a 13-year-old boy whose sense of wonderment and security is shattered one Christmas when he comes to realizations about sex, death, community, and the ineffectiveness of his foster parents. Jutra, drawing heavily on the ethics of the French New Wave, especially “The 400 Blows”, presents this small mining town, post WWII but still two or three years before their own independence revolution, steeped in a ritualized malaise, where the duties of the local shop owner extend beyond mere convenience to town undertaker, and the death of a country boy from sudden sickness is no less shocking than the death of a miner from black lung. Criterion’s DVD features two documentaries, one examining the film’s reputation as “the greatest Canadian film of all time” (a possible exaggeration), and a feature length doc on director Jutra, whose promising career flamed out in spectacular fashion, ending in a long disappearance and eventual suicide, but whose name lives on primarily on the strength of this intimate and acute human drama.