I'd always wanted to see this, preferably in the director's preferred three-hour version, and finally managed it. (Though not on the big screen, alas.) "Mon Oncle Antoine" is such a great film, and it was hard to believe this movie best remembered (if at all) as an expensive flop didn't have major redeeming factors as the same team's followup. Though very different from that preceding movie's warm, nostalgic take on rural Quebec life, it still has great atmospheric and visual appeal in illustrating the period setting--genteel life (however rocked by inappropriate passions) in remote towns and farms of the later 19th century.
The problem is that while an episodic, anecdotal structure was right for "Antoine," a more unified approach is required here, and Jutra doesn't even try. Instead, he seems to lurch from one tone and episode to another, sometimes playful, sometimes cold, sometimes providing odd distancing devices (one scene is played sped-up, like a silent movie at the wrong projection speed). None of this provides any continuity for the main actors, whose characterizations thus never quite snap into focus--despite their obvious talent--and it depletes the movie of emotional depth as well as epic sweep. This is definitely problematic in what's essentially an amour-fou triangle, in which mad desires stir infidelity and even murder within a staid, respectable society. We never feel any such passion (save in the crazy husband's self-contained mood swings, perhaps), so there's no force to the love--or whatever it is--between Bujold and Jordan. Indeed, those actors often seem to be obeying directorial commands more suitable to a staging of Strindberg or something else well outside the realm of naturalism. They're game, but the effect seldom adds up to more than arbitrary stylization.
This story from Anne Hebert's novel IS a melodrama, and while Jutra makes it clear he's commenting on melodrama rather than playing it straight, the nature of his commentary is never clear--the movie just doesn't have any clear perspective on material that it both visualizes handsomely and resists.
Still, "Kamouraska" isn't quite like anything else. It's oddly timeless in its oddity, with an overall feel that has dated less than just about anything from 1973 you could name. Whatever it was aiming for, it didn't quite hit the mark. But what it did achieve is nonetheless highly distinctive, for all the obvious flaws of pacing, narrative cohesion and dramatic involvement.
