Review: Mon Oncle (1958)

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 approach to his subject keeps any satirising only on the speculative level. In fact, the clash of the old and the new is presented in a way that is void of visible hostility. As can be seen in a house party that quickly turns into an uproarious fiasco, the consciously superior is just as easily susceptible to human follies as the unconsciously cloddish. And laughter and comedy are, in Tati’s filmic universe, the potent antidotes for every awkward situation, and the ready solution for social divisiveness.

For a major contributor of most of the film’s comic moments, Hulot maintains a rather peripheral and detached post amongst the happenings. In one particular sequence, however, Hulot is seen sneaking back to his sister’s house after the party to fix a vine decoration that he and his nephew unintentionally messed up earlier. This is the only scene in which Hulot is made the focal point: hurrying away the place in the dark, the noise awakens his sister and her husband; their heads are silhouetted from the circular windows on the top of the house, like two giant pupils of an unnamable monster; the lights reach the stealthy figure of Hulot as he suddenly stops short, and the audience is rewarded a suspenseful, stunning image of Hulot dramatically floodlit as though on a theatre stage.

In an allusive way, Tati expresses not so much pessimism for the coming age as a befuddlement for what it entails. This is a feeling that is evidently shared by even the reformists as they blunder along with their adjustment to the new life. Many of the ensuing bizarre situations involve with the introduction of new technologies that prove more of a menace than an improvement to human living: Hulot’s flat, which sits atop an old building enhanced with intricate gadgetry, is only reachable through a series of labyrinthine passageways, landings and elevated terraces. 

Inept at his job at the factory and is too close to his nephew for the liking of his disapproving brother-in-law, Hulot is in the end dispatched from the town. Crumbling buildings are shown finally dismantled, no doubt making way for more gaudy, ultra-functional complexes like Villa Arpel (the house of Hulot's sister's), and Hulot is greeted with a hasty farewell by the concierge's daughter, who trades her normal, home-spun attire with grown-up coquetry. This poignant final look at the soon by-gone chapter is, however, in the very end, superseded by a surprisingly cheerful outlook for the future: Hulot's nephew, now without his beloved uncle by his side, finds an unlikely playmate in his father, much to the latter's joy.