My Uncle Who is in America

My Uncle Who is in America - 2004-02-16. Director: Alain Resnais. Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Roger Pierre, Nicole Garcia. France, 1980, color, 123 minutes. "My Uncle Who is in America" is one of the most original and important French films of the 1980s. This film also marks the beginning of a new artistic direction for director Alain Resnais, who, while maintaining fluidity and mastery in editing, has infused his work with a new frankness and clarity that is more realistic than his previous films. The film is an appealing mix of fact and story, science and art, biography and melodrama, starting from the theories of a real biologist named Henri Laborit, who believed that cultural forces are the main shaping and constructing elements of human tendencies and 'natural' drives. The film consists of three stories that progress in parallel. Each story follows the life of an interesting character from birth to a critical point in their mid-life. René (Gérard Depardieu) is the hardworking son of a farmer who intends to leave his ancestral and rural roots to move to the city and start a new industry. The next character, Jean (Roger Pierre), is an ambitious intellectual and manager of a media outlet who decides to enter politics. The third character, Janine (Nicole Garcia), is a talented and witty actress who struggles to find work due to bad luck. Janine becomes Jean's lover for a while. The symphonic structure of the film weaves these different threads into a network of analogies and recurring themes, with memorable details. All these flows and interactions form an eternal search for the roots of human behavior, which is interestingly displayed in this film. The private stories of the characters are very interesting and original, and the director's art lies in never reducing these stories to a symbolic level or to bland, unremarkable evidence, unlike some local directors. The scientific explanations sprinkled throughout the film commendably blend with the melodramatic parts. Even where Professor Laborit appears photogenic on screen, as if his movements are unpretentious and his character is intriguing, it is the performance of the skilled French actors, Depardieu and Garcia, that alleviates the tedium of the professor's lectures.