My American Uncle

My American Uncle (Mon oncle d'Amérique, 1980), directed by Alain Resnais, is available to watch online on iFILM — a French drama laced with comedy and melodrama. It follows three people: a textile-factory worker, an actress, and a manager who climbed his way up. Resnais doesn't present their lives plainly; he treats them as living case studies.

Case studies of what? Of the ideas of neurobiologist Henri Laborit, who appears on screen himself, calmly explaining why people fight, flee, or freeze. René is a plant manager gutted by corporate layoffs. Janine is an actress who learns her lover's wife is dying. Jean is a writer and politician stuck at a fork in his life. Every so often the camera cuts to lab rats, and the characters' behavior suddenly rhymes with the instincts of animals in a cage. The 'American uncle' is the fairy-tale relative everyone counts on to fix things — except he never turns up.

Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia and Roger Pierre play people who copy their favorite movie stars without realizing it. The film took the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and still ranks among the wittiest attempts to fuse science with cinema. It's for viewers who like a film that makes them think, not just feel. Put on My American Uncle (1980) online on iFILM.