Word: tati
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...Love Game (in French). Jean-Pierre Cassel, playing a ludicrous but lovable mixture of Don Juan and Peter Pan, emerges as the funniest Frenchman since Tati's Hulot...
Actor Cassel, 27, is easily the funniest Frenchman seen on screen since Jacques (Mr. Hulot's Holiday] Tati; and The Love Game, the first New Wave comedy released in the U.S., is a happy, bawdy but somehow innocent and always violently spontaneous little pa ama party. "What you do," the heroine informs the hero thoughtfully, "you do well. But-not seriously." Morbleu! he wonders. What more does the girl want? "A baby." The hero pales at the thought of marriage and fatherhood. "Fill your needs elsewhere," he proclaims indignantly. She finds a rival (Jean-Louis Maury) and gets engaged...
Hulot's method of attack is a subtle one: he doesn't really pursue his prey; it pursues him. In Mon Oncle, Modern Times closes in on the good-natured Hulot (played by M. Tati, who also wrote and directed the film) in the form of a paunchy brother-in-law. Brother-in-law is an officer of an ultra-modern company which manufactures plastic hoses and similar useful items, and he has constructed for himself, wife and son a house with every conceivable inconvenience...
Brother-in-law's house represents the ultimate in uncomfortable functionalism, with a push-button kitchen, chairs that Hulot can't sit in, and a garden featuring a metallic fish which spouts water (used for company only). Director Tati and his man Hulot take this cheery homestead and turn it into a mechanized madhouse. Hulot, after discovering a rubber-based pitcher that bounces, tried to bounce a glass, only to find that brother-in-law's technicians haven't modernized that item yet. When a modern sofa proves impossible for Hulot to sleep in, he discovers that turned...
Hulot never defeats the age--except perhaps at the party and at the factory when he starts producing rubber sausages instead of rubber hose. Essentially, however, Tati attacks the modern world by showing what it's like at its ludicrous best. Mon Oncle is, in fact, a magnificent series of satiric vignettes, and Tati's greatest achievement here is that of the director who catches in the subtlest and funniest touches the humor and charm of life...