Criterion Collection No. 111
1958...116 minutes
Color...1.33:1...Not Anamorphic
Dolby Digital Mono...1.0
French
Special Features... Video introduction by Terry Jones;...1947 short by Jacques
Tati, L'ecole des facteurs
Mon Oncle is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1. This new digital transfer was created from a 35mm interpositive. The sound was mastered from the 35mm magnetic tracks. Image restoration: Daniel Sellier; Sound restoration: Sophie Tatischeff, Specta Films; Telecine colorist: Richard Deusy, Scanlab, Saint Cloud
Monsieur
Hulot ...Jacques Tati
Monsieur Arpel ...Jean-Pierre Zola
Madame Arpel ...Adrienne...Servantie
Monsieur Pichard ...Lucien Frégis
Betty, landlord’s...daughter ...Betty Schneider
Walter ...J.F. Martial
Neighbor Dominique Marie
Georgette, the maid ...Yvonne Arnaud
Madame Pichard...Adélaïde Danieli
Gerald Arpel ...Alain Bécourt
Braces dealer ...Régis Fontenay
Flea market dealer ...Claude Badolle
Drunken man ...Max Martel
Working man ...Nicolas Bataille
A film by ...Jacques Tati
Artistic collaboration ...Jacques Lagrange
Producer ...Louis Dolivet
Director of...photography...Jean Bourgoin
Sets ...Henri Schmitt
Music ...Alain Romans...Franck Barcellini
Slapstick
prevails when Jacques Tati’s eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the
ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in an antiseptic factory that
manufactures plastic hose. Tati directs and stars in the second entry of the
Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.
When
you first see Monsieur Hulot, the whimsical wanderer played by Jacques Tati in
the classic French comedy Mon Oncle, it takes a moment to realize just
how big he is—a two-meter slab of trenchcoat and fedora, his lips perpetually
pressed around the stem of a black pipe. He is often seen from the back—a
gangly giant observing life’s oddities, curious, perhaps bewildered, but not
disapproving. Despite his size and
his intense awareness of his environment, he moves with lightfooted grace,
personalizing the world around him in a series of small, charming, seemingly
offhand gestures. Early in the film, he opens a window in his flat and hears a
bird chirp for a split second. Intrigued, he opens and closes the window until
he figures out precisely why and when the bird chirps: at a certain point on its
axis, the windowpane reflects a beam of sunlight onto the bird’s nest, making
it think that morning has come. Pleased by his discovery, Hulot wedges the
window in sun-reflective position so that the bird may sing indefinitely.
...There is mystery to Hulot, a sense that he lives mostly in his own world,
occasionally adjusting the wider world to make it more livable—or at the very
least, more reflective of his own eccentric desires. Mon Oncle, arguably
Tati’s best and most pleasing movie, is an illustration of the
actor-filmmaker’s myopia—a myopia which afflicts everyone in the modern era
to some degree, and which Tati brilliantly explored in meticulous physical
comedies. The story of a young boy
who prefers his absentminded uncle to his rich, acquisitive, gadget-obsessed
parents, it presents a world in which characters are defined solely by their
actions—actions that are often captured from a distance, in tableaus packed
with people, structures, streets and vehicles, all working at cross-purposes yet
somehow managing (just barely) to function. ...Tati’s Hulot, the Oncle of the
title, is a simple man with simple needs who often finds himself bewildered by
the mindless complexity of modern city life. The filmmaker has often been
described as a miniaturist, and the label fits; as a director, Tati relies on
long shots that transform people into figurines in a clockwork landscape of
doodled dioramas. Cars drive in regimented rows along freshly paved
thoroughfares, following flowchart-style networks of arrows that guide them onto
sidestreets and finally into parking lots segmented into identical, boxy parking
spots; a place for everything, and every man in his place (a concept that will
be explored more elaborately in Playtime and Traffic).
Hulot’s apartment building—anachronistic, yet charming and well
preserved, just like Hulot—looks in long shot like a dollhouse. As Hulot
ascends to his flat on the top floor, we catch glimpses of him through square
windows. None of the building’s other residents see Hulot’s humorous,
accidental disappearing-reappearing act, and Hulot doesn’t see them, either.
Or perhaps they all unconsciously choose to ignore one another—a condition of
city life we all can recognize. ...Much of Mon Oncle is like this—a
voyeuristic comedy in which the only person spying is the audience; Rear Window
played for whimsy. Like the characters in Hitchcock’s apartment complex,
Tati’s people are sketches of urban anthropology. The film’s situational
humor encloses them—boxes them, figuratively and sometimes literally, like zoo
animals (though at least zoo animals know they’re caged). We study them,
realize how much we share with them, and smile. ...Tati’s gift was his ability
to see how his own goofy, oblivious singlemindedness was reflected not just in
others, but in Western civilization, which became increasingly crowded, hectic
and gadget-obsessed during the middle part of the 20th century. He
was an ex-vaudevillian, a prodigiously gifted comic and a notorious
perfectionist, fond of characters that live in their own private dreamlands and
are bewildered when life doesn’t rush to meet their needs. Keenly aware that
modernization eliminated some cherished virtues—solitude, contemplation and a
sense of connection—Tati’s comedies show us how technological changes
dismantled the old idea of community. ...Like Tati’s handful of other movies
as writer-director, Mon Oncle allies itself with the visual strategies of
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the silent-era Laurel and
Hardy. It uses sound the way Chaplin used sound in City Lights and Modern
Times—as tapestries of aural gestures (car horns, footsteps, bird calls) that
accentuate the director’s economical, cartoonlike style.
Dialogue is avoided unless absolutely necessary; Tati would rather
identify characters mainly by their dress, posture and behavior, and by how they
interact with their complex, impersonal and often silly environment. A rich
business owner wears a stuffy suit and tie and glasses; his blandly chipper,
consumerist wife wears “comfortable” dresses that resemble pastel-colored
shopping bags. ...Their house, like the city that encloses it, is designed to
trumpet the ingenuity of engineering while calling attention to its lack of
functionality. The front walk is serpentine, which turns every visit from a
guest into a spectacularly pointless (and endless) grand entrance; the lawn is
carved into jigsaw-puzzle patches of differently colored grass, all of them far
too pretty for a child to play on. At the center of this monstrous lawn is a
sculpture of a fish jutting up out of the soil like Excalibur. It shoots water
towards the sky at the flick of an indoor switch; the woman of the house only
trips the switch when company outside the front gate waits to be buzzed in.
Visitors can hear the gushing of the fish as it’s turned on, thus
undermining its impressiveness. In this gag—repeated, delightfully, throughout
Mon Oncle—you can see the gears of social need turning, just as you can
see the gears of urban life turning elsewhere in the picture. ...Tati’s work
is all about the gears—how they turn, how they interlock. At once a minimalist
and a ringmaster of spectacle, he constructs elaborate visual
contraptions—successions of gags, linked by theme rather than story—which
illustrate the mechanisms behind our modern world. Hulot (like Tati, and like
the audience) exists both inside and outside the machine, a gentle and
melancholy sentry, taking notice and taking part, commenting and living; a
clockmaker making clocks with transparent faces. He wants us to see the gears
and appreciate their scale and precision—and realize how their very existence
turns us into gears, too. .........
Matt Zoller Seitz