Mio zio d'America

Professor Henri Laborit is one of the geniuses of the previous century. And Alain Resnais directed a movie faithful to the scientist's work.

We could say about Mon oncle d'Amérique that it's a totally original film. It's impossible to compare it to any of the other movies in the history.

This piece of art shows in a very elegant and clever way how we human beings behave. It's as brilliant as deeply moving.

Definitely a must-see that reminds us why we used to admire Gérard Depardieu. The use of the archive footage of Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, and Jean Marais are very touching in the middle of a movie that seems to be cold and demonstrative but that is not.

Watch this masterpiece ASAP. You'll never regret it.

Usually with films we supply our own model of viewing, what values and parameters we accept to matter. Here the model is built in the film itself. It's an epistemological vision of human behavior patterns, guided by a behavioral biologist. We are provided with a set of criteria that govern our actions, fight or flight, actions taken to prolong pleasurable sensations or to avoid their opposite, and based upon the scientist's research, Resnais creates scenarios to exemplify them. Theory in practice, more or less.

This is the first handicup of the film for me. Resnais's consistent mark of genius has been his ability to visualize the mind as a threedimensional space, where by characters who act as our proxies into this world of the mind we can wander that space in an effort to discern the mechanisms that sustain it. How the forms we later experience as real come into being, illusionary. His vision is poignant for me precisely because it is translated as cinema, which as a blank canvas where upon it various flickering narratives are projected, is an ideal replica of the mind. He gave us Hiroshima and Marienbad, which is more than most directors contributed to the medium.

But Resnais always approached his subject as a poet, with capacity for awe and mystery, whereas now his vision feels constricted to fit criteria and structures.

Nonetheless the film does well to present us with situations we may know from life. An illicit thryst, frustrations at work, various ambitions for love or power thwarted, the outcomes of these don't matter. We're meant to identify the roots of suffering, how it arises in the form of sensation within the matrix that we experience as reality.

So far the film is wise, in showing us to be lab rats trapped in a glass panel box which is intermittently electrocuted by unseen devices. Perhaps we come to understand by this how suffering is an inate response to life in the cage, therefore inescapable. And how the devices that produce our suffering are invisible to us from inside the cage. Even more importantly, how our various attempts to imprint meaning on the objects of our world, by naming them or pretending to arrange them into patterns or hierarchies, are merely masks we have devised to conceal simple impulses and desires. To be safe or sated, or to avoid pain.

But the film is cautiously scientific, and will not venture further. The above important realization is mute for me without the spiritual. It is a dry understanding of fascinating stuff.

None of which is very subtle anyway. We're lectured a bit. We actually revisit excerpts of earlier scenes so we can identify specific reactions as narrated to us by the scientist. The lab rat metaphor couldn't beat us around the head more, if we actually saw the actors with the head of a rat reenact an angry exit. Wait, we do! But none of this bothers me overmuch. What bothers me is the pessimism.

Which is to say that having understood all this, the mechanisms that control the apparent reality we experience as our everyday routine, we are in position to transcend them. Our bodies may remain in the cage, yet having understood all this, how various forms of ego and desire blind us, our consciousness is already out of it. A glimpse out of the box is possible. Or as the film says, understanding the laws of gravity does not mean we escape them but we can get to the moon.

This is of course a fundamental attribute of how we are not like animals. We are not even animals with the unique ability to remember and form connections between the objects of memory. We are spirited beings. The film, conservative as issued under the credence or pretence of science, does not dare to articulate as much.

But then we have the final image, which says more than most films ever did. It's something I'll want to keep inside of me.

We see the mural of a tree painted on the brick wall of a building. From a distance, it looks beautiful, perhaps the real thing. But once up close, we see the beautiful, harmonious shape for what it is. Bricks as particles, a structure ugly, functional, nondescript, bearing no resemblance to the overall shape.

Two levels of reality then, apparent and ultimate. Order, shape, meaning from afar. Distinctions between brick and tree, as created in the eye. But once inside we understand the emptiness, the sameness of everything. How the above attributes are illusionary, imprints of the eye upon the wall. Will this image terrify or soothe you?

Perhaps the film understands more than it lets out from its cautious application of science. This is one of the 5 best metaphors in the history of cinema. It's so good, it's worthy of being in Blowup.

What an odd way to start a film. We seem to be hearing a lecture about the brain, and human development, interspersed with introductions of several characters who don't seem to have much in common. But then Resnais starts working his magic, intertwining the stories of three people with the behavioral theories of Henri Laborit. Human behavior is compared to the behavior of lab rats, and even turtles and wild boars, and each new idea is illustrated in the lives of the main characters. And as an interesting third layer, each character has an "avatar" from classic French cinema; clips from their films are interspersed to comment on the action.

Too bizarre, you think? I thought so at first, but after awhile I was hooked. Fine performances, beautiful cinematography, and a captivating, multi-layered script makes this film an unforgettable experience.

I just saw this - after having heard of it, seen it on video store shelves for over a decade. A movie that begins oddly, drily, repays anyone who pays attention for at least 15 minutes with something absorbing, warm, fascinating and often quite funny.

It is one of the most thought-provoking movies I've ever seen in my life. I disagree that its appeal is limited to intellectuals or those who like the director (I'd seen only Last Year at Marienbad, couldn't tell hide nor tail, and that was all I thought of Resnais).

Depardieu's character is one we can relate to fully as much as we do to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman - but all the principal characters (except the cold as ice boss of Depardieu) are greatly sympathetic.

This is just so moving and powerful a movie about the life we life - our work, our anger, our sorrow, our obsession, our ambition, our ideals and the way we deal with the things we want in life. Just stay with it for 15-20 minutes - you'll be fascinated. This is truly superb, truly absorbing, truly unique.

On paper this isn't really my kind of movie by a country mile but I'm always ready to see anything that Depardieu decides to appear in and Nicole Garcia is not too hard to take either if anybody asks you but then you have to factor in Resnais, a loose canon whichever way you slice it, a guy who's as likely to film a Viennese Operetta with a static camera as lay a metaphysical treatise on an unsuspecting audience. He's also something of a risk-taker and here he does himself no favors in the opening minutes by giving the impression we've wandered into a lecture complete with lantern-slides. But soon you find yourself drawn into the three loosely connected stories and a little later you find you've surrendered completely to the left-handed charm. Not for the faint-hearted or the popcorn brigade. 8/10