“Mon Oncle” (1958)
Tati’s “L.A. Story,” “Mon Oncle” begins the second Hulot adventure by following a pack of dogs as they waddle and sprint in from the pastures of suburbia to the grey slabs of a modern metropolis. Thus the film immediately contrasts country life with city life so that Tati can spend the next two hours mocking the latter with extreme prejudice. This is easily Tati’s most didactic film—he’s no longer inquisitive about the middle-class obsession with modernity, he’s downright pissed. In “Mon Oncle,” Hulot is the unemployed uncle of a little boy whose joyless parents live in a house that doubles as a monument to impractical social novelty. Hulot is beloved by his nephew, but his sister and her husband—a soulless executive at a hose factory—regard the man as an ingrate in desperate need of direction. Unsurprisingly, Tati doesn’t take their side. “Mon Oncle” finds Tati taking his first steps towards the larger set pieces that would later dominate “Playtime,” and you can see his anger slowly coming to a boil as some of these extended sequences play out. By the time his sister’s fish fountain begins spouting mud—and that’s not a euphemism—the careful crescendo of action has elevated what could have been a quick laugh into the rare example of high art that’s also profoundly funny. Which isn’t to say that the film’s more fleeting sight gags, like those generated from the needlessly winding path that extends from Hulot’s sister’s house, aren’t scathing in their own right. Regardless, the most indelible moments of “Mon Oncle” might be derived from its simplest pleasures. An early shot of Hulot skulking through his house (which looks like two houses somehow wedged together) might be the single greatest summation of what made Tati so special. His world is our world, but it’s heightened just enough so that even a glimpse of a man climbing the stairs to his apartment is imbued with a symphonic majesty. Also, without “Mon Oncle,” there’s no way we’d have the Roomba. We can’t prove that, exactly, but if you look into your heart you know that it’s true. [A-]
“Playtime” (1967)
Jacques Tati takes his Monsieur Hulot and puts him in the background, nestled in amongst the crowds and even film’s overlapping dialogue, in a metropolitan Tower of Babel, where much of the Parisian haute monde mingles with eager tourists, salespersons, and patrons. The infamously expensive set of “Playtime” is constructed as a global intersection of culture, where control panels are bigger than the operators operating them, cubicles accentuate their cubiness, and the products of technology are on literal display in a prison of the geometrical skyscraper glass. Here, comedy is in constant motion. As an exegesis of the technological revolution, scrupulous in its depiction of the calamitous results of commoditization, “Playtime” is Jacques Tati’s tour de farce, and the apple of the French cinematic eye. Cinematographers Jean Badal and Andréas Winding work magic in 70mm whether it’s day, night, interior, or exterior. Composer Francis Lemarque’s liltingly jazzy score makes you want get jiggy with the ferociously funny central dance in the film. And it boasts a sound design with a sense of humor, and a production design of inventive, resilient flexibility. Indeed, every frame in “Playtime” feels blueprinted from scratch with one clear design in mind: the humorous revelation of the modern, absurdist, plague of consumerism. The film is famous for bankrupting Tati and taking nine years to complete, which includes the construction of the monolithic building in the urban center of Paris, but the final result is a globally influential piece of work that was worth the heartache. In an honest discussion of perennial films and their constant growth in thematic relevance, “Playtime” is surely slipping and sliding near the very top. [A]
