Mon Oncle

Slapstick prevails again when Jacques Tati’s eccentric, old-fashioned hero, Monsieur Hulot, is set loose in Villa Arpel, the geometric, oppressively ultramodern home and garden of his brother-in-law, and in the antiseptic plastic hose factory where he gets a job. The second Hulot movie and Tati’s first color film, Mon Oncle is a supremely amusing satire of mechanized living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

A number of very funny scenes take place in the ultra-modern/minimalist garden, which features a big fish sculpture that spouts water (often erratically and with great comic effect). The garden has more style than substance and furthers Tati’s statement on modernism and consumerism. “Tati created some of his funniest sight gags for Mon Oncle to contrast the horrors of mechanized, high-tech suburban life with the joys of community living in an old-fashioned Parisian quarter.” (NY Times)

website: janusfilms.com/films/1130