Word: tati
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...this movie, much as Chaplin was in Modern Times, Tati seems more passionately determined to expound the technological unemployment of the soul in modern life than he is to relieve it with a saving smile. In consequence, this comedy of mechanized manners and synthesized morals-despite the big prize (Cannes Festival) and the rave reviews ("The greatest French comic film ever made") and the big money ($1,400,000) it earned in France-turns out to be the least amusing of the three pictures Tati has turned out. It is merely hilarious...
...usual in Tati's pictures, there is really no plot. On the one side, Tati lines up the protagonists of the gadget: a manufacturer of plastics, whose 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...
...moviemaker cuts from one way of life to the other, makes his points by contrast. When he looks at life in the living machine, Tati has some wonderful fun with an electric stove that has a monstrous control panel, and with a rationalized garden in which, of course, nothing grows. But it is when he looks at life on the seamy side that Tati has his grandest inspirations. There is a marvelous sequence, apropos of nothing, in which a dog leads a man on a leash. Yet surely the funniest passage in the picture is the long slow crescendo...
...such moments-when he throws all social and philosophical considerations to the winds and concentrates on building up the 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...