by Allan Fish
(France 1958 116m) DVD1/2
Aka. My Uncle
Mind the fountain!
p Louis Dolivet d Jacques Tati w Jacques Tati, Jacques Lagrange ph Jean Bourgoin ed Suzanne Baron m Alain Romains, Franck Barcellini art Henri Schmitt
Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot), Jean-Pierre Zola (Charles Arpel), Adrienne Servatie (Madame Arpel), Alain Becourt (Gerard Arpel), Yvonne Arnaud (Georgette), Jean-François Martial (Walter), Betty Schneider (Betty, Hulot’s landlord’s daughter), Dominique Marie (neighbour), Adelaide Danieli (Madame Pichard),
If I’m being honest with myself, Mon Oncle is the one of Jacques Tati’s seminal quartet that in some ways I have problems including here. The problem is it sets up a paradox, a comedy that actually doesn’t have many laugh out loud moments. It’s clever, of course, but we don’t laugh at Tati’s look at modernism as we laugh at, say, Keaton’s The Electric House or Chaplin’s Modern Times. We smile, we sort of laugh, but it’s always subdued. And between the jokes, not a lot happens at all. It’s a problem that many people have with Tati, that gags come and go, often without beginnings and nearly always without ends. Many one can see coming, others one wishes we didn’t. Yet still, for all that, it’s hard to find fault on a technical level with Tati’s film.
The title tells us what we need to know. Tati’s Hulot is back, five years after his holiday, and this time we see him with those he knows well; his family. We need no telling that he’s a bachelor, for while Frank Spencer can have a wife, lightning can’t strike twice. His family is his sister, a materialistic woman who lives with her businessman husband in a state of the art personally designed house along with their small son Gerard, who loves his madcap uncle and just likes to spend as much time as possible out of the house on the streets with his school friends.
Reluctantly, his brother-in-law gets Hulot a job at his factory, and as one might expect it’s a recipe for a mini-cataclysm. Hulot himself doesn’t live with his sister’s family, living instead in a topsy-turvy house, part Brothers Grimm and part Salvador Dali, in which Hulot’s rooftop garret can only be accessed by the sort of circuitous route that only the most sadistic architect could imagine – at one point he has to walk through a balcony decked with washing hung out to dry, at another he has to walk around in a circle for no apparent reason, and at another he actually has to descend a flight of stairs. Here he’s beloved by his old landlady as well as by a pubescent girl, Betty, who gives him sweets, which seems like a sort of sinister role reversal fifty years on.
Everything about the film could be seen as circuitous; the winding path for no apparent reason inside the family garden, the streets in and around the home and the husband’s place of work, even the fact that the film begins with dogs roaming the streets and ends with the same, except one of the seeming strays is actually the family’s dachshund. There are numerous wonderful pieces of silent ballet, from Hulot’s night-time invasion of the garden to finish trimming the vines he’d so butchered earlier to his starting a fresh fountain in the gravel that results in repair works to that wonderful fish fountain that makes it look, for a few seconds at least, like they have struck oil. Throw in a kitchen that even outdoes that in Keaton’s aforementioned short.
All of which doesn’t get away from the problem, that one doesn’t laugh much at what goes on as we did at Buster falling in the pool from the first floor in that short, or indeed at Jacques as the postman cycling into the river or playing tennis. Yet still, in spite of our misgivings and waiting to be brought out of ourselves, one is left with a sort of satisfied glow as we take the disc out. It’s the little details one loves, like the kids’ lamp-post trap, or the husband going to the garage to get his car after breakfast still holding a drink in his hand in a way to have Mad Men’s Roger Sterling applaud. For at the end of the day, funny or not, its study of bourgeois snobbery is as vital as ever it was and his use of colour and design inspired.
I suppose this does technically have kids in it. What is says about actual Childhood though, I apparently missed. Will rewatch.
This doesn’t conjure childhood unless one looks at Hulot as a sort of child who prefers that everything remain as it was. When one looks at the nightmare of modernity Tati conjures in this film, the past certainly does look tempting. This is one of my favorite films, and unlike Alan, I laugh quite a lot at its absurd set-ups. Thanks for a fine write-up, Alan.
Yeah, I could see that being a justification, but maybe just not for this film—to continue Allan’s reference in the first paragraph (Keaton’s THE ELECTRIC HOUSE) I recall the crazy gadget house in the opening sequence in PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, a film that does depict the events of a clear man-child.
I am a big fan of Tati, so happy to see this in the childhood series.
I love Tati too, doesn’t mean I’d, say, vote him into a Westerns countdown though.
Haha, Well I didn’t say that just because I am a fan of Tati. The whole notion of this film derives from the relationship between the uncle and the nephew. This is certainly a film about childhood even if not entirely, especially a bourgeois one. There is wonderful comparison between the kid & his friends from the poor neighbourhood and the dachshund & the stray dogs, this itself shows us the state of his childhood. And even though Mr. Hulot remains to be protagonist, he is seen more or less from his nephew’s POV. Another example I could give is that of the architecture of the school and the factory being same, it also gives us a feeling how these rich kids are being processed like in a factory rather than being educated. I know many wouldn’t agree but childhood remains to be one of the important theme of this film for it clearly portrays the innocence and a child’s interaction with his environment.
I enjoy this film more than the other Hulot films and actually do laugh quite a bit at it. But I think it’s a real stretch to call it a film about childhood.
I completely understand the questions encircling this film’s inclusion in the childhood countdown. And to be sure I did not cast a ballot for it myself either. However, I do like that the group expanded the boundaries to include a psychological and thematic connection to this countdown, choosing a film that asks readers to look beneath the surface. 90% of the films in this countdown feature films that are irrefutable, but a few like this one don’t make such an obvious connection. In any case a very fine review here from Allan!!
It’s been too long between viewings for me to reflect accurately upon the childhood qualities being present or not. No doubt it’s a masterpiece, but obviously quite a few people voted for it so it has something going on for many. In some ways, family visits from relatives can have a huge impact on our memories of childhood. In this way, I do kind of relate with the inclusion on this countdown and the sort of feelings and qualities associated with having an aunt or an uncle come to visit. I guess that’s how I interpret it for this film.
I saw a snippet of this once, eons ago, and I’ve been wanting to know what it is, but couldn’t describe it well enough. Thank you so much for jogging my memory. This is going straight to the top of my to-watch list.