A viewer might feel obliged to take Alain
Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique highly seriously, to assume that the juxtaposition
of the film’s narrative (which follows three very different but eventually intertwined
lives from childhood to middle age) and the wall-to-wall commentary by
behavioural scientist Henri Laborit generates a work of unusual analytical acuity.
Resnais disclaimed any such intention though, and from today’s perspective, in
part informed by the director’s often singularly whimsical subsequent work, the
film plays primarily as a sly, deliberately unsolvable puzzle, encouraging us
to find correspondences and echoes and explanations while fully knowing that
the exercise will lead only to frustration (like gifting a jigsaw puzzle in
which some of the key pieces are missing, or imported from another puzzle
altogether). Even if it could be demonstrated that the story the film tells was
in some kind of perfect conjunction with Laborit’s theories and explanations, that
story would still be (however superficially enjoyable) a pumped-up melodrama (including
such elements as a lie about being mortally ill and a desperate suicide attempt)
of limited inherent interest, the exercise providing little or no insight into
how to conduct or what to expect from our own lives (the lab-grown aspects partly
evidenced in how removed and unmoving it all feels). But any allegations of pumped-up
self-importance should be adequately punctured by Resnais’ occasional use of rat-headed
people in illustrating our conditioned nature (years before David Lynch and his
rabbits!). And the film’s very title provides a warning against overly literal viewing;
all three principals refer at different points to an American uncle, but as
someone whose biography is unclear, or who may not exist at all, America itself
absent from the film until its final sequence, and then used mainly to
illustrate the desolation that may result from mankind going off track (and in
this respect, at least, the film has a point…)
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