Film Friday: Jacques Tati's 'Mon Oncle'

Jacques Tati is one of the most beloved French filmmakers today, even though he only made six feature films during his lifetime and died eight years after his last film. He was one of the best comedians to ever grace the screen, with a beautiful grace that not even Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp could approach. While silent comedy was his trade, Tati understood that he didn't need to be in every frame of his films to make an audience laugh and that's what made his films so unique. The characters he played weaved in and out of his films. In fact, one could say the scenarios and gags were his true stars.

Tati's best known films are his four as Monsiuer Hulot, the character introduced in 1953's Monsiur Hulot's Holiday, which won international acclaim and was even nominated for the Oscar for Best Writing, despite being filled with dialogue that had nothing to do with the story. On the heels of that success, Tati set to work on his next film – which came five years later – Mon Oncle. It was an even bigger success, earning France the Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1958.

While Hulot is the catalyst for nearly every gag in Holiday, Mon Oncle shows Tati moving in a new direction, which he would build upon in PlayTime (1967) and Trafic (1970). He had a knack for inventing visual gags where Hulot didn't have to be at the center of them. In this way, he was very different from the American silent comedians he loved. This takes a lot of the burden off Hulot and means that his character can speak as little as possible.

It also allows Tati to create two entirely different worlds. In Mon Oncle, Tati introduces Hulot's inability to understand the modern world, despite his attempts to do so. On one hand, we have the Arpels, who live in this sparse, ugly futuristic home that predicts the sets in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hulot lives in the old world, living at the top of a building with other tenants and is friends with his neighbors.

What links the two isn't Hulot, but the Arpels' only child, Gerard (Alain Becourt). Gerard loves spending time with his uncle, Hulot, who picks him up from school each day. On their way home, Hulot lets him hang out with friends, play pranks on pedestrians and eat junk food, much to the chagrin of Mr. Arpel (Jean-Pierre Zola). Mrs. Arpel (Adrienne Servantie) doesn't have a problem with Gerard hanging out with her brother, but she does agree with Mr. Arpel that Hulot needs to settle down. They try to set him up with their neighbor and get him a job in Mr. Arpel's factory. In both cases, hilarity and disaster ensues.

The problem with the Arpels – and with just about everyone else in Tati's movies other than Hulot – is that they underestimate the strengths of the old world. They believe that modernization is better than the gifts of nature, which simply isn't true. Garage doors, plastic-making machines, bouncing pitchers and flashy cars may make you happy for a moment, but love shared between humans is the best gift anyone can give themselves and each other. It's a concept that children easily understand, but adults lose sight of.

Tati wasn't sentimental and had a very dreary view of the world. While shot in color, Mon Oncle often feels like a black and white movie as even the old world Paris looks gray. I don't think he thought happy endings were always possible, even in comedies. PlayTime and Trafic don't exactly have happy endings, although PlayTime does offer some hope that we can escape consumerism. For Tati, happy endings could be possible on a very small level. While the entire world may be a bustling mess, at least Hulot can help a father and son can reconnect. That sounds like a small victory, but it's huge for Tati.

Tati's style of humor isn't exactly boisterous. It's low-key, with multiple gags even going on in the same shot. If you don't pay close attention or aren't watching the film on a big enough screen, you might not even see the gags. (This is actually a bit of a problem with PlayTime. That film was shot in the large 70mm format and you might think Tati is just holding a shot for too long, but in reality, he is showing a small joke in a long shot.) His humor is simple – children trick pedestrians into walking into a pole, the Arpels' dog shuts their garage door with them inside and Hulot has a run-in with a plastics machine. And, most importantly, this is all visual humor. You could easily shut off the subtitles for Mon Oncle and not lose any plot details.

While Tati didn't care for dialogue, it doesn't mean that he didn't like sound. He loved surprising audiences with bizarre sounds for rather mundane things. One of the funniest examples in Mon Oncle is the clicking and clacking that the factor secretary's heels make as she scurries across the hall. The “pop-pop” made by the plastic is hilarious, too.

Mon Oncle is charming, hilarious and heartwarming, despite Tati's social commentary. That's his genius, since he could get away with making fun of modernity without sounding like an overbearing teacher. Instead, he's the uncle you always want to hang out with, letting you do things your parents don't normally allow.

On Home Video: Mon Oncle is available on Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection's recently released The Complete Jacques Tati box set. It's an essential set, with all six of Tati's films, plus his shorts and hours of bonus material I still haven't had time to go through.

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