Word: hulot
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...Uncle (French). Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot's Holiday), who is probably the cinema's most gifted present practitioner of the sight gag, has produced a satire on the mechanization of modern living that is always pretty witty although, in movie-making terms, it is sometimes tatty Tati...
...whose big feet, small head, great height and bolted rigidity invest him, as he jerks and jolts and fidgets through his films, with the marvelously absurd demeanor of an Eiffel Tower out for a Sunday stroll. But from his solitary eminence, Moviemaker Tati (Jour de Fête, Mr. Hulot's Holiday) takes a solemn view of the comic art and the contemporary scene. "Look what is happening to us," he glooms. "This specialization. Depersonalization is taking all the human meaning out of our daily life. A man used to be proud of the way he could drive...
...pride and joy is the cubistic chateau in which he spatially participates with a severely functional, ever-scrubbing wife, a discontented son who is obviously a round peg in a square hole, and a free-form dachshund. On the other side, Tati ranges the proponents of the casual life: Hulot himself, an awesomely inefficient employee of the department of sanitation, a big fat slob who sells vegetables from the back of a prehistoric delivery truck, a sneaky old female janitor and her moronic daughter, several sinister schoolboys, several drunks, an overstimulated canary and any number of mangy mutts...
...exquisitely precarious card house of a complex gag-Comedian Tati seems the funniest funnyman now at work in films. The trouble is that Tati is not content to be merely a comedian. He has developed all sorts of crypto-Chaplinesque rationalizations about the deeper significance of Monsieur Hulot-"modern man ... at the mercy of objects . . . enmeshed by circumstances." The film, as a result of these lucubrations, is at least half an hour too long, and in the length it fails to find a rhythmic respiration that might have shaped so many disparate episodes into a breathing whole. Too bad that...
...laws live in a hyper-modern house, sterile as an egg-bin, where the garden is gravel and a robot polishes the floor. They try to get Hulot a job with the firm, they try to set him up with a neighbor widow, they try to reform him; they fail, of course. He makes sausages out of plastic hose at the plant, devastates their garden party, and transports their son on his fuming motorbike. The characters, in their smug posturings and ridiculous appearance, are like cartoon characters, as the film itself is a plotless continuity of cartoon-like situations...