France comedy
1958
color 117 min.
Director: Jacques Tati
CLV: Though not currently available, this title may be returning at a later date.
           1 disc, catalog # CC1205L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
We
first met Mr. Hulot on a holiday, at a rundown seaside resort hotel, a loner but
hardly a recluse. Immensely likable, eager to turn all living creatures into his
loving friends (and usually successful at it): Why would such a charming,
appealing fellow go off on a holiday by himself, one might ask. Has he no
companions of the bosom, no relatives?Yes, he has relatives, and from their
antics in Mon Oncle, our second rendezvous with the enchanting Hulot, we
discover reason enough for his preference for solitary vacations. His sister is
Mme. Arpel, who is married to a dyspeptic plastics tycoon, and whose greatest joy
in life is the tidy, superlatively mechanized home her husband's affluence has
bought for her. Clickety-clack she goes, on her stiletto heels along the concrete
garden stepping-stones. The garden's proud centerpiece is a fountain in the shape
of a fish, which gurgles into action when visitors arrive. Indoors there are
other sources of pride, including a staggeringly overdesigned automated
kitchen.
There is also a son, Gerard, and he is a cause for concern: He does
not respect his father's car. And then there is her brother, Hulot, and he, too,
is a cause for concern. So convinced are the Arpels in the rightness of their
push-button lifestyle that they can only look upon Hulot as a classic deprivation
case: no job, no wife, a yawning social chasm that demands to be filled.
To
this end, Arpel arranges a job for Hulot in his plastics factory; Mme. Arpel
attempts a match between her brother and her next door neighbor (whose prize
possessions, by the way, consist of a garden and a garden tractor, both exactly
the same size). Both projects end hilariously, disastrously. Hulot snoozes on the
job as a huge plastic extrusion machine entrusted to his care runs endlessly
amok. A garden party runs similarly off-track, as the spouting fish-fountain
spews its aqueous terror across the Arpels' front yard.
It would be simple
enough to pigeonhole Mon Oncle as another in a long list of simple-minded
essays on the matter of nature vs. the machine; this marvelously observant,
richly detailed film goes far deeper. For all their inane obsessions with
consumerism run rampant, the Arpels are not unlikable; they are charming in their
own way, as Penelope Gilliatt put it, "partly because they treat themselves as if
they were machines and partly because they have lost the defining sense of
relative importances ..." Their tragedy is their frustration in not, at least so
far, having passed their values on to their young son. In this process, they
quite rightly see Hulot, whom the boy adores, as their enemy. Still the film is
called Mon Oncle, and the loving, joshing, easygoing relationship between
the boy and his untamable, rumpled uncle lies at the movie's beautiful, radiant
center. In the ongoing counterpoint between the uncle' s sunlit, disorganized way
of life and the Arpels' existence under the bright fluorescences, there is no
question as to where the tune truly lies. One can hope for the best possible
happy ending, that Gerard will in time escape past the electronic gates and
discover the better, purer life in a high garret in a run-down Paris
neighborhood, with neighbors that smile and canaries that sing and bakeries that
produce handmade, misshapen masterpieces.
There is, in fact, a kind of happy
ending; Hulot has been packed off to yet another new job in the provinces (which
he is bound to bollix in due time). Gerard and his father, returning from seeing
him off, stumble by accident into a replay of a game that the boy and his uncle
had once invented. There is a tense moment, then a moment of high
hilarity - perhaps the first time that father and son had ever laughed together. It
becomes also, therefore, a moment of hope.
Released in 1958 and awarded the
Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year, Mon Oncle has been the most
honored and most written about of all Tati's sadly small list of comic
masterpieces. There is a quality here that, more than with any others of Tati's
oeuvre, seems to approach a state of classical music. As with all four of the
Hulot films - as, for that matter, in a Mozart symphony - it charms first by its
fresh simplicity and only later by the depth and richness of its
technique.
It's only later, for example, that you realize the richness of the
sound structure, the way all of the dialogue - from Arpel's fulminating oratory
down to Hulot's subverbal near-silences - becomes a second kind of music to blend
with the marvelous, manipulative richness of the music itself, the score of
Franck Barcellini and Alain Romans that mingles sweet, light jazz and electronic
sounds to underline the counterpoint between the diverse lifestyles of Hulot and
the Arpels. It's only later, too, that you come to recognize Mon Oncle's
exquisite, immaculate structuring, the bits of visual thematic material that
recur (as in a Mozart symphony) to give the film its sense of sublime movement.
As with Mozart, the humor runs deep and true; as with Mozart, also, there isn't a
wasted note.
ALAN RICH
Credits
Director: Jacques
Tati
Producer: Louis Dolivet
Screenplay: Jacques Tati
Cinematographer:
Jean Bourgoin
Editor: Suzanne Baron
Music: Alain Romans, Franck
Barcellini
Transfer
This edition of Mon Oncle was
transferred from a 35 mm master print.