Mon Oncle

One of my favorite movies is Mon Oncle directed by and starring Jacques Tati. I first encountered this French film during my film architecture class in college. I watched it in one of those typical "language lab" rooms with little stations and headphones, but dark with TVs instead. I kept cracking up while I was watching it and the girl sitting behind me kept shooting evil glares. I glanced over at one point to apologize for my uncontrollable peals of laughter and noticed she was watching a very serious and humorless documentary about irrigation and farming in some third world country. I would be crabby if I had to watch a documentary about digging ditches.

Mon Oncle is this hilarious film about a hapless Frenchman, Monsieur Hulot, and his disastrous collisions with modern life. He wears narrow pants that are too short, a trench coat, smokes a pipe and often trips or falls down. There's a lot of physical humor, which is fun. There isn't much dialogue so the film can be a bit slow at times, but the slapstick aspects of the film make up for it. The film is "educational" because it's Tati's commentary about modern architecture, modernity in general and conformity. I can justify watching movies as homework because my professor assigned it. The automated modern house in the film basically goes nuts and causes a bit of a ruckus for the folks who live in it.

Tati's character, Monsieur Hulot, appears in another film (Playtime) that also critiques modernity. Playtime is set in Paris among modern glass skyscrapers. The Paris that appears in Playtime is indistinguishable from any other city. Famous Paris monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower, only appear only as a reflection in the glass. To drive this point home, Tati features a travel agency in his film that had posters of world destinations hanging on its walls. Each poster features the same modern glass skyscraper and the only distinguishing difference in the poster is the person standing in front of the building. For instance, for England it's a glass building with a Buckingham Palace guard standing in front, but for Japan, there's a Japanese woman dressed in a kimono standing in front of the same building.

Tati didn't really make very many films because he was a bit nutty about the details in his films. For Playtime, he built a skyscraper city set in the outskirts of Paris at 80% the size of real building. He then created perspective for all his streets by lining up real cars in the front and lining up other cars that gradually got smaller and smaller until the last car being a matchbox toy model car. It took him forever to make his movies and I think was a bit depressed in the end. I'm not sure what the lesson here is, but nonetheless, "let that be a lesson for us all."