#111: Mon Oncle

A ramshackle three story house with windows, balconies, and outdoor stairs that give the impression of a maze.

Mon Oncle, 1958, directed by Jacques Tati, written by Jacques Tati, with the artistic collaboration of Jacques Lagrange and Jean L’Hôte.

Not even Triumph of the Will announces its visual strategy as succinctly as Mon Oncle, which opens with the following credits:

A sign with four long, oval sections, with credits for Mon Oncle printed on it, in the manner of the signs architects put up at construction projects. Behind the sign, a crane towers over a modernist office building under construction.

Followed immediately by the film’s title:

A French streetcorner with an old-fashioned lampost, surrounded by very old stone buildings. Four small dogs, two white, one black, one brown, are sniffing at the base of the lampost. On one of the stone walls, “Mon Oncle” is scrawled in white paint.

It’s cold, sterile modernity versus warm, chaotic life, down to the adorable pack of wild dogs. Bet you can’t guess which side Tati comes down on. It’s a bit of a stacked deck: outside of Woody Allen movies, I’m guessing pre-Modern France wasn't always as charming as Tati makes it out to be.

An extremely charming French street scene. In the foreground, an old woman leans over a cart of fresh greens. In the background, two old men sit at a table in front of a cafe called “Chez Margot.”

Nor were the worst excesses of modern architecture as magnificently ugly as the film's central set, the Villa Arpel:

A catastrophically ugly modernist home, with circular windows in some places, square ones elsewhere, a ghastly sculpture of a giant fish, and a yard groomed into rectangular blocks of different colors: grass, gravel, paving stones. A man in a grey suit and a woman in a green housedress stand on the front stoop.

Too bad Mon Oncle was made before Brutalism really got rolling. It’s the architectural equivalent of Ween spoofing Pink Floyd; designer Jacques Lagrange found a hidden dial in modern architecture and turned it to eleven. To say Mon Oncle was a step forward for Tati as a filmmaker is to understate the case considerably: Lagrange and production designer Henri Schmitt both worked on M. Hulot’s Holiday, but nothing in the earlier film prefigures the kind of absolute mastery of the frame found in Mon Oncle. These would be the best designed sets in cinema—if Tati hadn't gone on to make Playtime. And Tati uses color precisely as Sirk: old France is all warm yellows and browns; modernity is, well, just look at it.

A minimalist office. The floor, walls, and an abstract map of the world are all colored metallic gray. A table with metal legs serves as a desk; two chairs with no cushions are in front of it. Behind the desk, a a secretary passes a folder to a man in a blue suit sitting at the desk. Charles Arpel sits at one of the guest chairs.

After establishing a hard-line distinction between the old world and the new, Tati throws Monsieur Hulot (dressed for the first time in a warmly-colored brown raincoat) into the gulf between them. There’s a lovely shot of him carefully putting a stone back into place on the crumbling wall that divides the two worlds.

A crumbling brick wall that once served as a base for a wrought-iron fence, parts of which are still attached. Behind the wall is a street and a row of grey, modernist buildings. M. Hulot, in a brown raincoat, ill-fitting charcoal trousers, and a cap, is halfway over the wall, carefully replacing a brick he knocked off.

The Villa Arpel belongs to none other than M. Hulot’s sister, her husband, and their nine-year-old son. The plot, such as it is, revolves around their efforts to figure out what to do with Hulot. In the character of M. Arpel, we find perhaps the closest thing to an antagonist in any of Tati’s films. Jean-Pierre Zola plays him as the very embodiment of pig-eyed self-satisfaction.

A portly man in a grey double-breasted suit and brown shoes, standing on the front steps of Mon Oncle‘s modernist home. He is putting his cigarette case back in his pocket, with an as-yet-unlit cigarette at a jaunty angle in his mouth.

It hardly seems like a fair fight. Of course, calling dirty pool misses the point: Mon Oncle makes no claims of realism. I wouldn’t even call it a cinematic essay; it’s more of a fantasia on The Theory of the Leisure Class, and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’m not kidding about Veblen: his sidenote that the “canon of reputable futility” demands curved driveways (because they waste time and space, they proclaim that their owners have time and space to waste) comes to glorious life in a throwaway shot of Mme. Arpel and her neighbor animatedly greeting each other, staring off in opposite directions.

The front lawn of the Villa Arpel, showing its s-curve walkway. Madame Arpel, in a pink outfit, is walking to the left, while a visitor in a blue flowered print dress waves to the right.

This is not to say that Mon Oncle is a critique of the ways in which modern design has failed to live up to the ideal of form following function, no matter how many times Tati returns to shots of characters pretending to enjoy sitting in painfully uncomfortable chairs.

Madame Arpel and a visitor in her bare, minimalist living room. The visitor, in a red dress, is precariously balanced on a green couch with a cylindrical seat.

For one thing, M. Hulot’s apartment is not exactly a triumph of functional design, no matter what color it is. In a long shot that I’m certain Wes Anderson has carefully studied, we see Hulot ramble his way through various windows and stairwells to the top left of frame. As Matt Zoller Seitz notes, it looks like a dollhouse.

A ramshackle three story house with windows, balconies, and outdoor stairs that give the impression of a maze.

I love Seitz’s observation that in the Arpels’ hideous fountain, only turned on for guests, “you can see the gears of social need turning.” I’m not so certain I’d go along with his assertion that Hulot is in any way part of the “mechanisms behind our modern world,” however. You couldn’t reverse engineer a smoothly oiled machine from his workplace performance, for instance.

An austere hallway with grey floors and walls. In the left foreground, M. Hulot sits at a desk, looking up with a really dumb expression on his face. Down the hall, a man in a foil and plastic protective gear walks into the hallway.

The only time we see Hulot fitting into the modern world like a cog in a gear, it's because he’s gotten drunk, flipped a sofa on its side, and passed out.

The living room of the Arpel house. A green, oval shaped couch has been turned over onto its side and M. Hulot is sleeping comfortably on the sofa's side. His coat is hanging from a chair, his shoes are on the floor, as is his pipe, an ashtray, and a newspaper. Madam Arpel stands to the right in a blue evening gown, having just discovered Hulot.

Gears have been much on my mind recently; the best movie of the Christmas season is obsessed with them. It’s worth noting here that for all its love of artifice and artificers, Hugo is built on the same premise that animates the Villa Arpel: people have a purpose; they can be repaired and fixed into place. Tati doesn’t see it that way: there’s no solution to the problem that is M. Hulot. And not just Hulot: one of the most delightful recurring gags in Mon Oncle has to do with a street sweeper who somehow never... quite... manages to swing his broom. There would be no place for him in Hugo’s train station, where everyone has a job to do (even if that job is filming our dreams). Of course, there’s an inherent tension in a meticulously crafted film that argues that meticulous craftsmanship is anti-humanist. But I think Mon Oncle manages to have it both ways—remember, the wall between Hulot’s world and the Villa Arpel is crumbling. There’s a wonderfully generous moment at the end of the film when M. Arpel, after banishing Hulot to the provinces, causes some Hulot-style chaos of his own. After inadvertently making a traveler walk into a pole, Arpel and his son hide behind their monstrous car, the son takes his father’s hand, and for a moment, the two worlds are united.

A small boy in a school uniform and a man in a grey business suit crouch down behind a garish 1950s Cadillac in green, purple, and pink. The kid has grabbed his father's hand.

So here’s Tati throwing a brick into the clockwork that rules us, beautiful and intricate though it may be:

People think it is a message, but it isn’t: one should be free to say to a man who is building a house, “Be careful. It might be too well-built.”

Supplements

A row of cars circling a drop-off point at a buss station or airport. In the foreground, M. Hulot and a traffic cop flank M. Arpel's terrible Cadillac. At the back of the line, we can see the elegant silhouette of a silver Mercedes Benz 300SL.

It may be a soulless machine, but it makes me cry like Daisy Buchanan.