As national cinemas go, Canadian film is as difficult to suss out as a koan. The best educated and most sophisticated country with so little to culturally prove to the world, liberal in politics but conservative in personality, Canada produces an enormous amount of cinema, much of it state-funded, but we see a small portion of it, and it has no discernible global identity. The Canadian films that are well-known and beloved by moviegoers tend, generally, toward the transgressive and experimental, the self-conscious art films of Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat), the gruesome, heady, assaultive genre movies of David Cronenberg (Videodrome, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence), and the hermetic avant-garde melodramas of Guy Maddin (Archangel, The Saddest Music in the World, My Winnipeg). These are films that would make an international splash no matter where they came from, but they hardly represent mainstream Canada so much as form a kind of percolating neurotic energy that occasionally bubbles to the surface, busting through the National-Film-Board-of-Canada-produced placidity. (Not surprisingly, the notion of hidden impulses bursting up through social conformity is a common theme for Egoyan, Cronenberg and Maddin.) What of the Canadian mainstream? How does this huge and historically rich nation see itself?

A clue can be gleaned from a poll taken once a decade, since 1984, at the Toronto International Film Festival, asking for Canadian critics, scholars and filmmakers to vote for the "greatest Canadian film of all time." Every time since, Claude Jutra's Mon Oncle Antoione (1971) netted the number one slot. (It's twice been voted the greatest Canadian film by Sight & Sound's once-a-decade critics poll as well.) Clearly, this underseen, little-known Quebecois drama holds a dear and lofty place in the hearts of Canadian movieheads, even if the rest of the world has largely paid it no mind. In fact, figuring out exactly what makes Mon Oncle Antoine so revered in the Canadian brainpan isn't terribly easy – it's a witty, warm, detail-rich but in many ways conventional rural family drama, set in a 1940s, French-speaking asbestos mining town so remote the film's milieu suggests the 19th-century frontier of the American western, and more specifically that of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, made the same year. That sense of temporal dissonance – a WWII-era story unfolding in a region that seems to have just caught up with gold rush Oregon – may be part of the film's allure, as it captures in amber a wide-spread Canadian reality that otherwise gets no screentime or even acknowledgment outside of the population it inflicted (and may to some degree still inflicts).

The resonances with Altman continue into the film's visual scheme, which use the hazy location photoggraphy, crowd-cluttered compositions and sudden zooms that Altman made famous but were, obviously, part of the early '70s pallette. Produced by the NFB, written by Clement Perron and based in some detail on his childhood experiences, Mon Oncle Antoine is the bildungsfilm for Benoit (Jacques Gagnon), a gangly young teen working and living with his general-store-owning aunt and his drink-sodden but beloved uncle. Outside, the town is oppressed and squeezed dry by the asbestos mine and its English-speaking owner, who dares to ride through the tenement shacks every Christmas in a fur coat and toss cheap toys to the children. (The film comes loaded with Quebecois bitterness toward the English-speaking majority, which in the postwar years dominated politically and economically.) This is a hardscrabble life, where fathers must leave their families alone in the snow for months at a time to work at a logging camp or another mine, and any illness is a prescription for early death. But in the store, the film's bustling arena for all kinds of dramatic revelation, Benoit learns about life, from class differences (the mine-owning families in town must shop there, too, buying special-ordered items no one else can afford), to community bonding to the realities of sex and betrayal. His climactic tribulation, however, is with his uncle Antoine, who in his role as the region's undertaker takes Benoit deep into the wilderness to a fatherless family where the eldest son caught a fever and suddenly died, and where the shell-shocked frontier mom habitually serves her visitors a meal before they cart the body away. The trouble for Benoit is, Antoine is drunker than usual, and the trip home (a true story from Perron?) turns into a life-risking debacle for the boy.

In the end, the movie finds humanity amid what are now, helplessly, cliches – the folly of adults and the indiscretions of infidelity glimpsed by precocious teens through door cracks, and so on. Jutra is no Altman; his characters are simple if not exactly simplistic, and his visual choices (including an outrageously unnecessary fish-eye caricature shot of the drunken uncle) are sometimes crude. But the place and period are tangibly evocative, the grim historical realities it portrays are indelible (the mother of the dead boy, having to fend for herself and her other children instead of grieve, is hard to shake), and Lyne Champagne, as a recalcitrant girl hired out by her father to work at Uncle Antione's store, is fascinating – she's not technically pretty, nor is her character particularly forthcoming, with eyes that never seem to settle on a single thing for long. But nevertheless, in Jutra's low-key Renoirism, she is cared for and respected to a degree that casts a forgiving glow on her as well as the characters in her orbit. The film's reputation might, after all, be simply a matter of seemingly underrecognized national identity seeing itself reflected back – Mon Oncle Antoine may stand in its culture's consciousness as the most thoroughgoing portrait thus far of a populace challenged by nature and hardship and yet still retaining a resilient warmth, against all odds.

The Criterion Collection DVD set includes the requisite booklet, trailer and optional English soundtrack, but also a second disc of homage documentaries, and a 1957 short Jutra co-directed with mezzobrow Canadian animation legend Norman McLaren.

For more information about Mon Oncle Antoine, visit The Criterion Collection.To order Mon Oncle Antoine, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson