(Part of The Complete Jacques Tati)
Distributor: The Criterion Collection
Release Date: October 28, 2014
MSRP: $124.95
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Film: A / Video: A+ / Audio: A / Extras: A-

Mon Oncle may be the second Hulot feature, but it’s the first to perfect the character’s symbolic importance. As in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, the protagonist is an agent of unintentional chaos, not the Tramp’s eager provocateur but a man who would love to fit in but, in keeping with his looming frame, just sticks out from the crowd. But where Hulot commanded his namesake film, Mon Oncle de-centralizes the character, necessarily hanging the loosely connected narrative around him but aesthetically and thematically reducing his importance.

Tati introduces himself with a shot staring at the back of his head, and for much of the film, his face is obscured by Hulot’s hat, or his distance from the camera, or the angle he’s facing. He first shows up in a quaint, traditional Parisian neighborhood, but the larger modernization of the city already dwarfs him: Hulot stays at an old, labyrinthine hotel that forces him to constantly disappear and reappear as he ascends to his room in a master shot that turns the facade of the building into a voyeur’s delight. This old hotel is then aligned with the hyper-modern abode of Hulot’s sister and her family, an angular cube of metal and glass that looks like a liveable showroom. It’s a house so thoroughly designed to be viewed that even its upstairs windows resemble eyes, peering back out at those who regard the house as if to say “Caught you looking.”

The film delineates the two settings with a symbolic contrasts (the live, singing bird that trills outside Hulot’s window with the fake fish fountain that sputters to life at the Arpel home to welcome guests), but the similarities of the voyeur-happy buildings are striking. Tati truly distinguishes them in how humans occupy the spaces: the hotel invites locals to gaze in, and it forces people to intersect and interact with each other, while the Arpel home exists merely to be admired, opened up with glass walls but hidden behind a motorized gate. The Parisian neighborhood is still, after all, in Paris, but people still live at a slower pace, as typified by the street sweeper always drawn away from his task for a chat, while the Arpels’ home represents design at its most nakedly consumerist, a paean to itself meant to entice viewers to aspire to its show of wealth.

Where Hulot unintentionally but nonetheless directly wreaked havoc in Tati’s last film, staging a revolution against nouveau riche conformist comfort without even realizing it, his disruption is more incidental here. Rather, as in the subsequent Playtime, the man usually only sets things in motion, and sometimes he simply acts as a witness. Tati links Hulot’s polite but bashful and inarticulate behavior to childishness, and it’s no coincidence he finds companionship not in the corporate environment his brother-in-law arranges to force the man into a career nor the match Mrs. Arpel attempts to make for his love life, but rather his nephew Gerard, who often hangs around with more streetwise kids. Their antics, of whistling from afar to distract people into walking into lampposts, or simulating fender benders to trick drivers into accosting the driver behind them for recklessness, are outwardly antagonistic, but also harmless.

Their outward desire to shake up a world they see growing too hidebound before their eyes contrasts with Hulot ably trying to adjust to his relatives’ world, most notably in a lunch party that prefigures the great collapse of Playtime’s final act. The sequence is a bravura work of comic construction, a slow burn of the inevitable awkwardness of implacably rigid social roles meeting each other and performing as if by pneumatic, unchanging pattern. In this context, Hulot merely punctuates the pre-existing travesty with moments of clumsiness, such as accidentally busting the water line to the fish fountain, or simply being unable to navigate the yard’s bewilderingly placed stepping stones, leading to moments of sublimely ridiculous ballet as Hulot shifts around impatient guests in an attempt to stay on the rocks while blocking their way.

Compared to the explosive, cathartic climax of Playtime, Mon Oncle’s key sequence is entropic, using Hulot’s larger farce to gradually hone in on the small displays of unsustainable consumerist life, one that uses technology and a supposedly freer economic circumstance to brutally reinforce and exaggerate preexisting social limitations. As such, the film initially seems like it peaks early and offers no release. But that’s precisely the point: to the extent that Mon Oncle fully focuses on Hulot, it is to mark him as symptomatic of a human being who is fundamentally incompatible with this new system, which, taking into account Hulot’s everyman quality, suggests a disconnect between humanity at large and their new social order. There is no solution in the film, and its suffocating quality is so pronounced that one factory-set scene even has Hulot passing out to a gas leak. It’s not until the movie quietly ends with a bonding moment between the careerist Arpel and his rambunctious son, however, that the full effect of Tati’s poetic critique hits home. Only when the director adds in a sliver of hope does the preceding farce become truly devastating.

A/V

Not counting the belatedly salvaged, desperately worn color print for Jour de Fête, Mon Oncle was Tati’s first color film, and the unimpeachable clarity of this new restoration makes clear how thoroughly the director understood color, as much as he did placement and sound, as a means of defining character and mood. Most of the movie is shot in earthen palettes that stress both the weathered beauty of old city brick and the stark utilitarianism of the steel and concrete of the new world. That only makes the flashes of pure, blazing neon color all the more dramatic, like the buzzing blue stripe on the Arpel home, or the bright red tubes at the plastics factory. Criterion’s transfer is so sharp that it posits the film as a precursor to Antonioni’s Red Desert in its stunning, thematic and outright confrontational use of color to define change and runaway progress. Black levels don’t come much into play, but they’re spotless in a delightful night-time sequence of Hulot trying to sneak out of his sister’s house, with the Arpel couple’s silhouetted heads forming impromptu pupils for the house’s “eyes” as they search for the source of his noise. Sound is also exceptional, once again highlighting the surreal crispness of the sound effects while minimizing dialogue to impressionistic mumbles or perfunctory chitchat.

Extras

Moving chronologically through this set, by this point I’m looking forward to Stéphane Goudet’s contributions as I am filling my Tati gaps and seeing the A/V transfers. Once again he delivers an incredible essay, this time focused specifically on Hulot the character throughout Tati’s filmography. Goudet continues to deliver, in a respectful but matter-of-fact manner, providing insight after insight with concise observation, well-chosen footage (of both final cuts and behind-the-scenes material), and a knack for connecting even the smallest gestures across films.

The disc also comes with “Le Hasard de Jacques Tati,” a 1977 French TV episode interviewing Tati about his dog and the dogs of Mon Oncle; an hour-long documentary on the making of the film; an introduction from Terry Jones; a three-part documentary on the film’s various levels of production design; and the English cut of the film, a superfluous creation given the minimal importance of dialogue to this loud silent picture.

Overall

Jacques Tati’s sublime, elegant comedy is a comic masterpiece, and Criterion give it a near-perfect A/V transfer and yet more terrific extras.