Nabokov once said that “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” With Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958), the satire and the parody are both a lesson and a game; or, more precisely, a game whose lesson has no other purpose than to highlight the contingency of playing. The oncle is Tati’s alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, who lives in a rundown area of an affluent suburb of Paris, within which his sister’s villa – a Le Corbusier-inspired futuristic monstrosity – ostentatiously stands. A bumbling, taciturn (with only two spoken lines throughout the film) flaneur, Hulot is the odd man out of the more polished and supercilious world of his sister and brother-in-law, but wins companionship and admiration of his nephew, who shows manifest disdain of the sundry technological wonders by which he is surrounded, and prefers the simple pleasures of outdoor activities and mischief-making. If the film is intended as a satire of the advent of modernisation, Tati’s invariably equitable, congenial