In tune with socially distanced festivities, the more melancholy end of the seasonal movie spectrum beckons, with an undertaker, sudden death and doomed romance
Even in a year that has made us numb to strangeness, it’s been a funny old December: a festive season largely without festivities, while many will be spending
Christmas apart from their usual crowd. With that in mind, the usual seasonal viewing options – those extravagant Christmas films that pile on the tinselly cheer – may feel out of step with the collective mood.
A time, then, for Christmas films that permit a little wintry chill, some room for loneliness or pensive melancholy. Or exquisite misery, if you feel like plunging into the anti-Christmas genre at its most extreme with Mon Oncle Antoine – a Canadian classic that I hadn’t seen until recently. Made in 1971, Claude Jutra’s film is an unsentimental coming-of-age tale, following a Quebecer teen through about the least jolly Christmas Eve imaginable, as he assists his undertaker uncle in the collection and eventual rescue of a dead body. If that sounds solemn, it is, but there’s hard-won humanity amid the austerity, and Jutra has an eye for crisp, severe beauty. It’s also free to view on
YouTube, thanks to the National Film Board of Canada’s marvellous archival channel.