Mon oncle (1958)
Directed by Jacques Tati

Film Review

Five years after Les Vacances de Monsier Hulot proved a major critical success, Jacques Tati and Monsieur Hulot returned to cinema screens across the world in Mon Oncle, a film which proved to be one of the cinematic highlights of 1958.  As with Tati's previous film, Mon Oncle delighted the critics and was a commercial success.  The film won not just the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but also an Oscar (in the best foreign film category).

In a similar vein to René Clair's À nous la liberté and Chaplin's Modern Times, Mon Oncle is primarily a satire on the dehumanising effect of technology on society and family life.  Monsieur Hulot and the Arpel family represent two opposite extremes of the social spectrum - Hulot, the unemployed working class man, symbolises the past, the Arpels, the epitome of nouveau-riche bourgeoisie, representing the future.  Yet it becomes clear that both are ill at ease with the new technology which has entered their lives.  Hulot manages to bring a factory to a virtual standstill in a matter of minutes, whilst the Arpels easily get themselves locked up in their own garage and have to rely on their maid to rescue them.  The moral is that technology has its place but there is a point at which such progress becomes more of a burden than an benefit to mankind.  Technology for its own sake (such as the fully automated kitchen which resembles a dentist's surgery) is a sterile, meaningless development, its main function being to allow you to impress your neighbours.  Of course, human nature being what it is, once the technological genie is out of the bottle there is no going back.  Playtime , Tati's next film, pursues some of these ideas further and paints a somewhat more worrying vision of technological progress.

Mon Oncle features some of Tati's best visual jokes - such as the house-proud wife constantly switching on and off her ornamental garden fountain whenever a guest arrives, and the high jinks at the plastics factory, where Hulot manages to get a machine to produce plastic pipes in the shape of strings of sausages.   As in many of Tati's films, contrasts are made between children (whom Tati most closely seems to identify with) an adults (who are usually portrayed as idiots).   The artificial pomposity of the Arpels is ridiculed whereas the natural rebelliousness of the young boys is glorified.  This suggests a parable of innocence in which the children, who have yet to succumb to the charms of technology are shown to be wiser than adults who, for reasons of greed or vanity, have made technology their god.  That Hulot seems to get on better with children (and stray dogs) only serves to underline this simple message.

Not only is Mon Oncle an a greatly entertaining piece of cinema, it is also frighteningly prophetic.  Forty years on, the charming world inhabited by Monsieur Hulot has all but disappeared and, to a greater or lesser extent, we have all ended up slaves of technology, much of which is of dubious benefit.   To this audience, watching Mon Oncle can be a poignant experience.  As we laugh at the exploits of Monsieur Hulot and his inability to adapt to a changing world, we see something of ourselves and perhaps nurture a secret yearning to return to a simpler, less technologically orientated way of life.

Film Synopsis

Monsieur Hulot rents a modest rooftop apartment in an old part of Paris, where traders sell their goods in the streets and young boys play games on unsuspecting passers-by.  His upwardly mobile sister is married to Monsieur Arpel, who runs a successful plastics factory.  The Arpels live in an ultramodern house, of sleek minimalist design, equipped with all the latest labour-saving gadgets.  Having no job, Hulot occupies himself by taking his nephew Gérard, the Arpel's son, to and from school.  Concerned about Hulot's influence over his son, Monsieur Arpel resolves to get him a job - even resorting to finding him a place in his own factory.  It is a mistake he soon lives to regret...