Mon Oncle d'Amerique

Stars: Gerard Depardieu (1492, Green Card, The Return of Martin Guerre), Nicole Garcia (Beau Pere, Corrupt), Roger-Pierre. Although I'm not a big fan of director Alain Resnais (to me, the "masterpiece" Last Year at Marienbad was like a 90-minute hellish journey through the mind of an interior decorator), Mon Oncle d'Amerique is an interesting exception. An intellectually challenging film, the story cuts between three very different characters (Jean, Rene, and Janine: two men and a woman) seen as children and adults whose experiences in their formative years often dictate how they will respond to stressful work and domestic situations in their adult lives. On top of that, the film regularly cuts to professor Henri Laborit, a behavioral psychologist in the Skinnerian mode, who talks about rewards, punishments, and inhibitions, and how these concepts influence human behavior. The first half hour, in particular, is a real bear: the film rapidly shifts between childhood scenes of the principals while the subtitles come at you like a preliminary test for an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Course. However, the weaving together of the characters' lives, coupled with the intriguing commentary by Laborit hold one's interest until the bizarre final reel, in which Laborit's experiments with rats are compared with earlier scenes from the film. Although Skinnerian psychology has always seemed to me a bit too simplistic in its explanations of human behavior, Laborit's comments are thought-provoking and, better yet, Sacha Vierny's (who shoots Peter Greenaway's films) cinematography is divine. Strangely, the video box sums up the story by saying that "faced with disappointment and frustration, all three [characters] muse about a legendary Uncle in America, a guardian angel who gives them their hearts' desires and tells them exactly what they want to hear," which not only has diddly wah to do with the story, but also suggests that this is lighthearted fantasy, which it ain't. Audience: This one's mostly for smarties or those who think they're smarties.