By Marilyn Ferdinand
Those of us who love the silent clowns of cinema—Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and many others—have a very affectionate place in our hearts for their kindred spirit, Jacques Tati. From his short films to his greatest masterpiece, Play Time (1967), and beyond, Tati created and honed his clown persona, Monsieur Hulot, and pitted his innocence and simplicity against a pretentious bourgeois world in love with progress. For me, Mon Oncle represents two aspects of the French character—infatuation with the avant garde and accommodation to the antiquated infrastructure with which most of Europe is saddled—as seen through the satirical eye of a man with (as Dennis Potter used to say) a tender contempt for both.
Hulot lives in old France, in a home that requires some careful maneuvering through other people’s homes to get to one’s own front door, with dogs and children running free, shopkeepers to greet, and crumbling walls and roads to negotiate. Hulot is well adapted to this world, where his occasional bumbling and ineptitude fit in with the lively sense of disorder that nostalgic French citizens and the outside world find so charming.
Hulot’s problems start when he goes to visit his sister in her ultramodern suburban home. Or should I say house, a place positively hostile to the human touch. The furniture is uncomfortable, with one cone-shaped chair a Venus flytrap for the unsuspecting human who might want to take a load off. The automated kitchen is so complicated that you might just have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out; heaven forfend picking up a spatula and flipping your pancake by hand. The slapstick comedy of Hulot trying to negotiate the world of modern conveniences is precise, quietly understated, and gut-bustingly funny; it is certainly a brilliant homage to Chaplin’s Modern Times. (more…)
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