French Movies

The film stars Geneviève Bujold, arguably Canada’s finest actress. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1970 and won the Golden Globe that year. The film’s director, Claude Jutra, also directed Mon Oncle Antoine, widely regarded as the greatest Canadian film of all time. It, too, is available on YouTube with English subtitles.

Mon Oncle Antoine

Bonheur d’Occasion (The Tin Flute) is based on the novel by the acclaimed Franco-Manitoban writer Gabrielle Roy. English captions can be automatically generated.

     “KAMOURASKA is a 1973 French-Canadian film directed and written by Claude Jutra, based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Anne Hébert. At the time of its release it was the most expensive film ever made in Canadian history.

      The film is set in rural Québec in the 1830s. Élisabeth at the deathbed of her second husband, Jérôme Rolland, is recounting her past, which is conveyed through a series of flashbacks. She was first married to Antoine, the brutish seigneur of Kamouraska, and fell in love with a Loyalist American doctor, Georges Nelson. He murdered Antoine. At her trial for complicity in the killing, Élisabeth is acquitted. She marries Jérôme to save her honour”.

 “The film MON ONCLE ANTOINE depicts life in the Maurice Duplessis-era Asbestos Region of rural Québec before the Asbestos Strike of 1949. Set at Christmas time, the story is told from the point of view of 15-year-old boy Benoît (Jacques Gagnon) who is coming of age in a mining town. The Asbestos Strike is regarded by Québec historians as a seminal event in the years before the Quiet Revolution (c. 1959–1970).

     The film is an examination of the social conditions in Québec’s old, agrarian, conservative and cleric-dominated society on the eve of the social and political changes that transformed the province a decade later”.

The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute)

        Bonheur d’occasion or The Tin Flute (1945), novel by Gabrielle Roy. Set in the Montréal slum of St-Henri during WWII, it is French Canadian literature’s first example of urban realism. The inhabitants greet the war as a source of salvation, rescuing them from unemployment.

        Florentine Lacasse, a dime-store waitress, is seduced by Jean Lévesque, a successful but selfish engineer; pregnant, she marries Emmanuel Létourneau, an innocently idealistic soldier. Her mother, Rose-Anna, is a modern mater dolorosa, giving birth to yet another child only to lose her husband to the war. Florentine’s young brother, Daniel, dying of leukemia in a hospital, experiences material comfort for the first time, helplessly surrounded by new toys. Their dreams about to be shattered, all are presented with sympathy and insight.