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Rating: Mon oncle d'Amérique is a 1980 film by Alain Resnais starring Roger Pierre, Nicole Garcia, Gérard Depardieu, Nelly Borgeaud.
The film received several awards and recognitions.
It is a truly interesting and original film.
It is the story of three parallel lives that end up crossing paths one way or another, and up to this point, nothing new.
The novelty lies in the fact that the three lives are, during the film, examined by Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the exercise of his professional function.
Laborit was an eminent French biologist, philosopher, and ethologist.
So, the behaviors of these three individuals, from birth to adulthood, are explained by Laborit, and when this happens, it's as if a light goes on.
Human behaviors, excluding those carried out daily for survival and which translate into the satisfaction of primary needs, are simply the result of our life, the socio-cultural fabric in which we have grown up, the sum of the notions we have learned.
All this to say that we are “the others." That if a man lived alone in the middle of the forest, he wouldn't even know how to speak…
Everything you have read so far is well-known, obvious, banal.
However, the explanations that Laborit gives to the behaviors of the film's protagonists are anything but banal—they were truly enlightening for me!
I would like to write down these explanations, but they would be the real SPOILER of the film, that is, if I tell you who the three are, what they do, and what happens, I'm not spoiling, not for this type of film. But if I tell you why they behave that way, well… let Laborit do it.
The film is also very amusing; consider the characters' identification with their childhood myths, Depardieu with Jean Gabin, for instance, and here too, as always, he is "the sum of others," and therefore he is also a bit like Jean Gabin...
The film also has a good pace and is excellently acted, the two hours don't feel long at all, and indeed, in the second part, when Laborit wraps things up and resumes the lives of the three, and therefore we see in flashback what they did, the film accelerates and surprises once more.
Mon oncle d'Amérique, l'oncle d'Amérique ...l'Amérique? it doesn’t exist, I've been there...
Not to be missed, to be watched and re-watched.
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