My Favorite Jacques Tati Movie

When I'm picking the directors for these spotlight posts, I go by a pretty simple rule. I have to have seen at least ten films or half of a director's filmography in order for them to qualify. Jacques Tati only made six films, two shorts, and provided the screenplay for another film completed long after his death. I've seen four of the full length films, but I've been hesitant about writing this post without tracking down the last two, most obscure ones. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that being a completist was very unlikely to change my final pick.

I knew absolutely nothing about Jacques Tati when I brought home "Mon Oncle" from the local library, a title I chose simply because it was a Criterion film, and I was in that phase where I was watching films from the collection pretty much at random. I knew it was French and that it was a comedy, but having recently subjected myself to some of the more esoteric French New Wave films, I figured "Mon Oncle," having been produced in roughly the same time frame, would probably be another of those self-mocking intellectual exercises that Godard was so fond of. And then I watched the film, and saw the opening sight gags with the parade of dogs, all the credits written out on signboards, and the film's title scrawled as graffiti on the side of an old building. The main theme was a jaunty little piano tune that I still find myself humming once in a while. And I realized I had stumbled across something wonderful.

Jacques Tati himself plays the "oncle" of the title, Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling, shabby comic figure who does odd jobs, lives in a ramshackle old apartment building, and has a variety of eccentricities. Hulot had been introduced a few years earlier in "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday," vacationing at a seaside resort, merrily getting himself into several comic scrapes, and poking fun at his fellow vacationers. In "Mon Oncle" his place in the world comes into sharper focus. We meet Hulot's young nephew Gérard (Alain Bécourt), who lives in a modern home that resembles a gray slab of concrete, fitted with all manner of modern gadgetry, furniture more concerned with design than functionality, and a dreadfully geometric garden. Gérard's snooty parents despair of the boy preferring to spend time with his rough-edged uncle, and try to help better Hulot, getting him a job at a modern facility and introducing him to better people. Of course, their plans go terribly awry.

Encroaching modernity is the enemy in "Mon Oncle," from the mechanization to the architecture to the mindset of favoring efficiency over comfort and common sense. The satire is merciless, but executed with a delightful lightness and whimsy. Like the Tramp in "Modern Times," Hulot is a lone figure constantly at odds with the nonsensical aspects of modern life, inadvertently causing chaos by failing to keep up with or simply ignoring the march of progress. Tati's work is very much in the tradition of the great silent comedians, and relies heavily on pantomime routines and elaborate sight gags. Getting to Hulot's apartment requires weaving through multiple staricases leading all over the building. When a machine malfunctions at the factory, the plastic tubing it produces comes out looking like a string of sausages. My favorite running gag is the awful fish-shaped fountain in front of Gérard's house, that only gets turned on for special visitors, and becomes more of an aggravation every time it's used.

However, Tati is also quite different from his predecessors. He knew how to use sound and color to wonderful effect, playing up the garish visuals of Gérard's home, and heightening sound effects to punctuate the action onscreen. Every time the fish fountain goes on, the sound of gurgling water drowns out everything else. Tati's timing and pacing is also quite different. The pace is never slow, but the gags tend to build over time, and many of the setups can be quite complicated. Some elements like the stray dogs and the awful garden recur multiple times before you get to any kind of punchline.

These gags would get even more elaborate in Tati's subsequent film, "Playtime," which was bigger and more ambitious in every regard. Many critics think it's Tati's best work for its conceptual daring, but I prefer "Mon Oncle" because Monsieur Hulot is a more interesting and sympathetic figure when interacting with his relatives. I also think the messages are more on point. You can see the clear divide between the old world of simple pleasures and the new one, a very cold and complicated place that is full of contradictions.

"Mon Oncle" was the second best blind library pick I ever made. I'll talk about the best one next month.
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