Word: benoit
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Worn by repetition, the story of how a boy becomes a man can still be a revelation. So it is in My Uncle Antoine, an earthy, substantial Canadian movie about a few days in the life of a lad called Benoit. The setting is contemporary-a small mining town in Quebec-but there is an appropriate aura of timelessness about it. Director Claude Jutra (Take It All) approaches the excellent Clement Perron screenplay with such intuition and insight that he manages to make Benoit's initiation at once universal and unique...
...writer-director Malle calls his shots a little unfairly at times. His script is contrived to labor an occasional unfunnny joke and, though Benoit Fereux's acting is mostly convincing, the role he has to fill is just a little bit larger than life...
...Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) is the youngest son of a prosperous Dijon gynecologist (Daniel Gelin) and his Italian wife (Lea Massari). Laurent's brothers are well-bred juvenile delinquents, but despite a pronounced affection for mischief, Laurent is different. Hardly into adolescence, he reads Camus and writes essays on existentialism that vex his schoolmaster-priest (Michel Lonsdale). Father Henri further advances his pupil's education by making tentative homosexual advances during confession, and Laurent's brothers chip in to buy him a bout with a tolerant whore. Laurent-perhaps because of all this frenetic activity-develops a heart...
...plans of both Benoit and Smithies rest on an implied political foundation: a pro-American, anti-Communist, antisocialist government in the Republic of Vietnam. Such a government would be bolstered by enormous amounts of U.S. aid. Benoit suggests that between 1970 and 1975, the United States should supply the Republic of Vietnam with $4 billion of economic aid and defense expenditure, plus another $9 billion of military aid. Slightly less generous, Smithies proposes a stream of foreign aid amounting to $5 billion during the next decade...
...them a token role in policy formation. Some of these reports are undoubtedly bureaucratic waste destined to line file cabinets. The Columbia study in particular, though, may be used to help gain Congressional funds for a multilateral agency to prop up a Thieu-ish regime. Like the Smithies and Benoit reports, it is a minor scenario for the tragicomedy of Vietnamization...