Word: tati
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...Uncle (Continental). Jacques Tati is a French comedian 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...
...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...
When you saw Hulot's Holiday, you got belly-laughs from Tati's portrayal of the Hulot personality. The whole responsibility of making the situations comic was his. But when you see My Uncle, the comedian Tati is solidly supported by script-writer Tati, and expertly guided by the director, also Tati. This makes for more humor, and subtler, and for a more acceptable cinematic whole...
...preposterous unintentional grips with post-war prosperity, the modern source of the bourgeoisie that the French have ridiculed for a hundred years. And his skill for satire, apparent on only a personal level before, is strengthened by the theme and enhanced by his fuller control of the production. Tati's broadside satire of the modern scene is sharp, and cuts particularly deep since in America there don't seem to be even any shabby unsuccessful humanists left for a comparison--everybody is like Hulot's ludicrous in-laws. But you're laughing so much that you don't feel...