Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House

As the distinguished guests queued to meet the French president, André Malraux breezed past the line, pushing the actor-director and his wife forward. “May I introduce Mon Oncle, Monsieur le Président,” the Minister for Culture announced, a twinkle in his eye. Reaching out to shake hands, de Gaulle addressed the visitor with grave politeness: “Allow me to congratulate you, Monsieur Tati, on having such a brilliant nephew.” Those who overheard the gaffe momentarily froze.

Having won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film with his latest work, Jacques Tati was the toast of Paris, hence his invitation to the state reception. But de Gaulle was unaware of who this celebrity was, or the title of his acclaimed film, Mon Oncle. Then Tati slipped into role and, clasping the head-of-state’s hand, shook it with Hulot-like dignity. Other guests could barely contain themselves.

Mon Oncle had been Tati’s Plan C. Following the commercial success of his previous film, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, he had wanted to make a comedy about French conscripts in a wartime Berlin labour camp. It would show them outwitting their Nazi captors, secretly living it up in spartan quarters, and undermining German munitions production. Friends counselled him to shelve the project. The mental climate in France was wrong.

Tati had an alternative plan. The Italian director Federico Fellini suggested filming a version of Don Quixote, allowing the Frenchman the lead role as well as participation in production planning and decisions. Tati was eager. He wanted to play the knight-as-fool. But Fellini never passed beyond talk.

Besides, the market was pressing for more of Monsieur Hulot, a role played by Tati himself. He was swamped with commercial offers for appearances of his character in advertising and on television. People wouldn’t let up. And there were incessant inquiries about another film, would-be backers suggesting “Hulot in Love” and similar themes—proposals Tati disliked intensely.[1] Then came the national newspaper poll where the gentle, warm-hearted, faltering and entirely fictitious Monsieur Hulot was ranked among the ten most popular people in France. The director felt himself being backed into a corner.

Jacques Tati had a loose idea for a sketch. It would play on un oncle d’Amérique (an American uncle), the vernacular French phrase for a vain well-off person who humiliates less-fortunate relatives by flauntingly distributing largesse. The director wanted to invert this term by using his Hulot character as a “French” uncle: a figure with no money, no job, no prospects, but who exudes Gallic geniality, tolerance and mild fun.[2]

Tati’s biographer, David Bellos, explains that the scene involved the relationship of a boy to two family members: his industrious and affluent professional father, and his irredeemably disorganised and playful uncle. The director had jotted down notes on a setting. He would contrast two urban lifestyles: to one side a traditional cramped and twisting old quarter of Paris, as against a modern villa in one of the newer suburbs creeping up around townships.[3]

Mon Oncle evolved from this raw sketch. The film followed the Arpel family: husband, wife and nine-year-old son. The Arpels are bourgeois in the full sense. They are affluent and conventional city people. Monsieur Arpel is the director of a plastics factory, his wife is extremely proud of their new modern home in a trendy suburb, and their boy Gérard attends a smart school. This family is swathed with the trappings of material success.

Into the equation enters Madame Arpel’s brother, Monsieur Hulot, an unemployed bachelor who has a tiny room atop a peculiar old house in a traditional quarter. He is valued as an honest trustworthy soul in his close-knit neighbourhood, a decent member of the Parisian community. But everything about him seems to invert the Arpels’ lifestyle, down to the way Hulot openly leaves the key above his flimsy door. In contrast, their home is protected by a high fence and electronic gate.

If young Gérard enjoys his uncle’s relaxed company—the pair have a strong bond—his middle-class parents view Hulot as a social embarrassment, an idler without ambition. This mirrors the perceptions of a “progressive” post-war world which designates him as human surplus. So the couple aspire to induct Hulot into their modern lifestyle. They want to arrange a reputable job for him, and to match-make a well-to-do wife.

Monsieur Arpel asks a favour of a business associate, leading to Hulot being offered a job at a chemicals corporation. But through a misunderstanding Hulot fails the interview for a clerical position before it begins. The personnel officer thinks him a peeping tom. Then the Arpels hold a small garden party where they try to pair Hulot up with a preening local sophisticate. He is unable to act the customary social games with her, indeed he reduces the gathering to a shambles, damaging the Arpels’ modern home. Finally, Hulot is assigned a menial job on the factory floor at Arpel’s plastics firm. Unsuited to mindless work, he breaks the machine that manufactures plastic pipe (it comes out shaped like a string of sausages).

Hulot cannot be “modernised”. In despair, the Arpels send Hulot to work as a sales rep in the provinces, while Gérard establishes the beginning of a warm relationship with his father.

The rising novelist Jean L’Hote, who Tati asked to assist on a screenplay, was perplexed. He was given nothing when writing began—no plot outline, no gags to build up, no set motifs to use. Add to this a dramatic complication. As in his last film, Tati wanted there to be almost no dialogue. Strictly speaking the pair were not writing a silent movie—because, besides a measured musical accompaniment, the film would use a soundtrack of orchestrated noises from daily life.

The director was confident a story would emerge. As a professional mime who had sharpened his craft in pre-war vaudeville, Jacques Tati had been extracting material from daily life for decades: “observation is everything”, he repeatedly assured L’Hote.[4] So the pair spent two entire years watching Paris. They would meet early each weekday, then walk about the streets, looking, and making precise notes.[5]

They began by watching dogs. They noted how dogs behaved when alone, on a leash, or with other dogs; what dogs did on a street, in a market, on waste ground. On the third week the pair watched a loose group of domestic dogs determinedly go into the ground floor of a Parisian apartment building then emerge minutes later from a greengrocer’s shop on the opposite side of the square. The dogs knew some concealed way to cross beneath the bustling traffic. Tati was enchanted, and L’Hote could see how the substance for a Hulot film would come into view.

Those dogs eventually punctuated the film. They would appear at its introduction and conclusion, and figure at transitional points to push the visual story along, pressing the unseen humour of a street. There is the dog on a leash that leads his drunken master home; the dog which gets its owner to open doors; the dog that bares teeth at a fish head protruding from a shopping basket; and the dogs shrewdly evading authorities trying to catch them. There is nothing strained or far-fetched. What we see is completely normal.

This approach tells in Tati’s depiction of daily work. Comedy films habitually exaggerate and embellish blue-collar toil to maximise laughs. Modern Times has Charlie Chaplin labouring at such a frenetic pace that he gets pulled into a vast engine; and I’m Alright Jack has Ian Carmichael so unwilling to tear himself away from a process line that he vomits into a spurious confectionary machine. These incidents may be hilarious, but they are ridiculous—and forced.

Compare them to the factory in Mon Oncle. Wearing a grey store coat, Hulot sits at a bare dispatch desk and takes occasional phone calls. He is utterly bored in what is a dull, meaningless job from the real world of work. Another labourer takes a cigarette break, asking Hulot to keep his eye on an adjacent extrusion machine. He agrees, but then he nods off, and the unwatched plastics machine produces too much bright red pipe. Hulot awakens, panics, reacts. What happens is funny, and plausible. What he does is a normal mistake. This faithfulness—there is no other term—is unique to Tati’s comedy.

That alertness to the everyday saw the consumer life of 1950s Paris spill into the film. There was the inaugural “World Detergent Congress” of September 1954, where “scientific experts” in white coats and rubber gloves lectured Parisians on domestic hygiene. This will be mirrored in Madame Arpel’s behaviour: in her kitchen she wears rubber gloves and uses tongs to cook an egg hygienically.[6]

Then there was plastic, the wonder material of the future. Tens of thousands of Parisians flocked to a 1956 exposition publicising the plastics industry, where continuous demonstrations explained the benefits of the new material. People were incredulous when plastic cups and bowls would be dropped then bounce, not shatter like ceramic or glass. Most popular was the long booth where a crowd looked incredulously as a technician in safety suit and futuristic cap fabricated brightly coloured hair combs from a mystifying machine. For weeks Paris was abuzz with excited talk about the exposition. Tati’s friend Raymond Queneau landed work to write the script for an expensive documentary on plastics manufacture, Le Chant de Styrène (his title puns on Le Chant de Sirène, the siren’s song).

Monsieur Arpel not only manufactures plastics, the glamorous substance. Hulot works at the factory alongside attendants, who wear clear plastic smocks and black goggles, gauntlets and boots, and who keep an eye on a fuming mechanism resembling the fêted device at the Paris exposition. And there is the scene in the Arpels’ kitchen when Hulot drops jugs and cups on the floor, wanting to see them bounce. But one is made of glass.

All was ripe for scrutiny, and laughter. Tati’s father, who had just retired from daily work, leased his shop to an ambitious businessman promoting the latest kitchen appliances. Tati and L’Hote made visits to inspect American inventions that would be parodied in the Arpels’ ultra-modern home. And when the director spent time in hospital, he took note of the modern equipment. The controls for an X-ray machine prompted the complex switches on the Arpels’ kitchen cooker.

Mon Oncle is a comedy of reconstruction. The film’s framing images deftly press this point. The opening credits are arranged on hoardings before a busy building site, with a concert of mechanical construction noises substituted for music. And, nearing the end, the audience sees workmen knocking down a shabby cottage, rowdily clearing a town block for mass-housing.

These were not convenient narrative devices. Jacques Tati’s subject was a transformation deeply affecting post-war France, and he had a weighty message: “Everything that gave Paris its charm and personality is being spoilt and torn down!” he said on the film’s release.[7] The father of two school-age children was uneasy for the community’s future:

Gardens are being abolished … Take those big blocks of flats they’re putting up in the suburbs. They’re surrounded by lawns but children are forbidden to play on them. The result: children go and play on waste ground as they did in the old days. But what happens when there’s no more waste ground left? A real child needs to break a window and get his ears boxed by the caretaker.[8]

Tati was doubtful of the advantages said to be embodied by an automated, progressive society: “life tomorrow will be inseparable from those twenty-storey buildings where a little chap will have to call, armed with a screwdriver, to mend the lift that’s broken”.[9] In his gentle, good-humoured way, Tati was raising values that mattered to him.

He did not have to search far for a suitable location. His film was shot mostly around Saint-Maur-des-Fossés on the south-western edge of Paris. The picturesque village radiated a warm untidy atmosphere, with its architectural mix of the sensible and the dishevelled snuggled around a late Second Empire main square. Saint-Maur required minimal work, with only one mock-up building being constructed there: the dilapidated and meandering three-storey residence in which Hulot lived.[10] Otherwise, the visual ambience of the square was perfect, and provided the setting to convey an old arrondissement where neighbours spill into each other’s lives in a friendly, spontaneous manner.

The film crew also used the adjacent suburb of Créteil for the exterior shots of the modern factory, school, roads and mass-housing estate. This new development was a forerunner of the grands ensembles crowding out the periphery of Paris. Créteil was a testing ground for urban planners, offering acres of graceless concrete apartment blocks set along austere streets of relentless straight lines with intermittent efficient arcs.[11] The contrast with the relaxed character of Saint-Maur could not be more extreme.

Créteil was the civic response to a crisis. France had been in ruins after the war, with more than a million buildings lost, including a sixth of domestic residences either damaged or destroyed.[12] The country also found itself harbouring 100,000 displaced persons by July 1945, a figure that was climbing.[13] And cities were experiencing an influx of migrants from France’s colonial possessions, especially from North Africa. So there was intense pressure for the government to deliver housing and employment opportunities; in fact, modernising industry was the national priority. Jean Monnet, who devised the infrastructure underpinning industrial reconstruction, had long preached the necessity to embrace progress: “There will only be greatness when the French assume the stature to justify it,” he warned de Gaulle. “For that it is necessary to modernise, because the French aren’t modern.”[14]

Tati wanted to use the severe, functional qualities of Créteil’s streetscapes to suggest a humourless modern suburb. And he was gratified to find the community there shared this unflattering outlook.[15] Residents would come up to him to complain about the morbid geometry of the area, the shoddy construction of their flats, a lack of amenities, and obstreperous local authorities.[16] One man showed Tati a “summons” the council had sent to him because his children walked on municipal lawns.[17] Far from being the utopia promised by urban planners, the people who lived in the modern estate felt it was nowhere near as comfortable as an old quarter. Modernisation, for them, seemed more trouble than it was worth.

Then there is “Maison Arpel”, the modernist villa in which the affluent Arpel family lives, a far cry from public mass-housing. This stylish, flat-roofed, geometric home represents the definitive status symbol for the progressively minded. There are no pictures on walls, no rugs on floors, no homely knick-knacks evident in the pale near-empty interiors where, as Madame Arpel chants, “everything communicates”. It’s a push-button dwelling equipped with odd electric gadgets, as well as modish furnishings designed to catch the eye, not for comfort (visitors sit awkwardly in wiry cone-shaped chairs).

Outside is a stark and geometrised courtyard with alternating rectangles of concrete, grass and pebble-dash. A pair of meagre trees are clipped into a rod-like row and espaliered against a wall. The focal point of house and garden is a metallic fountain shaped like a marlin leaping up from a small pond. At the press of a button this kitsch decorative feature, which the accident-prone Hulot will later break, spurts a tall jet of water.

The significance of “Maison Arpel” has been missed entirely by film historians. This crafty pastiche of an architect-designed villa in the International Style was built on set at the Victorine cinema studios in Nice.[18] Local audiences of the newly-released film straight away spotted how it was having a dig at a very public architect.

Le Corbusier—the nom de guerre of Edouard Jeanerette—was among those modernist demi-gods who straddled French design, architecture and visual art in the giddy 1920s. He advocated a refined style which fused the values of Cubist abstraction with Classical Greek proportion where all was steeped in square, rectangle and circle. By mid-decade his name was synonymous with blank white walls and flat roofs, with functional steel windows and unadorned interiors, with chrome furniture and stark geometric design. He specialised in creating elegant modernist villas and apartments for the well-heeled.

Le Corbusier courted controversy, crafting sage pronouncements—“a house is a machine for living in”—always publicising his design practice. There were critics—Frank Lloyd Wright scorned one house as a “white box on stilts”—although projects such as Villa La Roche (1923) and Villa Savoye (1928-30) were acclaimed as architectural icons. Still, it wasn’t enough for the tireless self-promoter. Le Corbusier’s ambitions were extending to urban planning. He published books on the subject, and pressed civic authorities to consider his utopian designs for extensive, multi-storey residential complexes to replace French cities.

Opportunity came in 1945. He was approached to devise an urban plan for Saint-Dié, in Lorraine, which had been destroyed by the retreating Germans. Local authorities were so pleased with his proposal they commissioned Le Corbusier to design and build eight Unités d’Habitation to house 10,000 people, plus civic offices and an industrial estate.[19]

Favourable word travelled, and Le Corbusier was summoned by Raoul Dautry, the French Minister of Reconstruction and Town Planning. The provisional government needed a prototype mass-housing complex, and needed it designed quickly as a model for reconstruction. Le Corbusier was appointed to develop a residential complex in Marseilles, construction to be completed by 1948. He was also made chairman of a government Mission on Architecture and Urbanism to liaise with reconstruction projects in other countries.[20]

But a vociferous public campaign in 1946–47 saw his innovative Lorraine complex ditched. The community at Saint-Dié was against Le Corbusier’s high-density civic plans, and the intended residents loathed his bare concrete apartment blocks.[21]

There was a similar backlash against his Unités d’Habitation at Marseilles, where an ugly administrative drama would be performed before the national media. There was public and municipal opposition; a campaign by conservative architects; an official report predicting health problems; then legal action; the site had to be shifted, twice; followed by cost overruns; the estate was reduced to a single apartment block; and the project was completed in 1952—five years late! Across France the political fallout led the government to shelve Le Corbusier’s extensive urban plans for Strasbourg and Meaux, and his projected mass-housing complexes at Nantes-Rezé, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy-Vert were reduced to single buildings.

Tensions were provoked by Le Corbusier himself. Take Marseilles, where his gridded grey tower was dubbed in local dialect the “Maison du Fada”, the madhouse. People were uncomfortable with the austere styling of an overbearing geometric building finished in béton brutal (rough concrete). Le Corbusier had also designed a standard ensemble for the flats, including set interiors and mass-produced modernist furnishings. And he expected his apartments to be preserved, wanting rules to prevent occupants from redecorating.

Le Corbusier was seen as an autocrat inflicting his tastes on the common man. Academics and intellectuals reproached him for his stubbornness; not that he listened. He was wounded, though, by Picasso, who visited the Marseilles Unité d’Habitation when completed. Pressed for an endorsement, Picasso suggested Le Corbusier come and build in his backyard a retaining wall from rubble.

This was the divisive background to public mass-housing when Mon Oncle was produced. As the contentious face of architecture, direct hints to Le Corbusier were worked into the film. The movie’s designer Jacques Lagrange roughed out an idea for “Maison Arpel” from collaged photographs of modern homes, shaping the interior and garden from shots of Le Corbusier’s iconic Villa La Roche and Villa Savoye.[22]

Besides parodying the style of rooms and courtyard, and stressing the machine aspect of the house, there were sight gags tailored to a French audience. The Arpels have a curious backless green vinyl settee in the main room. Late in the film Hulot flips it on its side to sleep on it, the relaxing form now mimicking Le Corbusier’s trendy B309 chaise-longue.

The most flamboyant sight joke involves “Maison Arpel” at night. Press cartoonists used Le Corbusier’s trademark large round spectacles to caricature his face—those double circles of the architect’s thick frame glasses had featured as far afield as New Yorker cartoons. Tati and Lagrange worked this comic motif into a nocturnal scene where the “Maison Arpel” watches Hulot with giant eyes, an effect caused by silhouettes of the Arpels glimpsed through two porthole windows. Across France cinema audiences erupted into hearty laughter when that image appeared on screen: the geometric machine house, a witty pastiche of his modern villas, has Le Corbusier’s goggle-round eyes.

Tati’s film was shaped with care. For this, his first colour movie, he wanted film stock that did not distract by glamorising props and settings.[23] Tati strongly disliked Technicolor because it made colours too intense. After shooting chromatic tests, the director settled on Eastmancolor as the best option.

This was a crucial decision, because Tati worked with his designer Lagrange to match and blend shades which govern the drama aesthetically.[24] The pair agreed on two scenic palettes. In the old quarter where Hulot lives they favoured colours with familiar associations, including foliage greens, pastel pinks and warm oranges. A second palette, using synthetic colours and metallic highlights against a prevailing cement grey, was devised for modern settings. The colours and sparse fixtures of home and plastics plant rhyme with each other, in keeping with Tati’s scenario notes that the house was a form of “factory”.[25]

The most severe modern interior is the president’s office at the chemicals corporation: his austere monochrome room, with its few shiny steel fixtures, exudes a cold and humourless efficiency. Otherwise the contemporary furniture in the Arpel’s home, and trendy attire worn by stylish women, offset the grey geometric surroundings with shrill greens, acid yellows and Ferrari red, as well as beige, black and fluorescent white. Males mostly wear unpatterned business suits in grey or black, with matching bland ties and white shirts. The exception is Monsieur Arpel, whose colour-co-ordinated casual attire prompts several visual jokes. The family dog, for example, wears a coat with the same scarlet-and-black pattern as Monsieur Arpel’s bespoke smoking jacket.

Sounds are orchestrated to match settings.[26] The old quarter reverberates with human laughter, arguments, singing, whistles, children’s calls, horses’ hooves and a trilling canary. Modern environments lack these natural sounds. There we hear mechanical clicks, engines running, whirrs, buzzes and the repeated clatter of footsteps on hard surfaces.

Film critics often comment that Tati’s camerawork is conservative and unadventurous. He hardly uses medium shots, and there are never close-ups. As a mime, Tati wanted audiences to watch the characters’ body language: the entire figure is kept in frame. But this can lead to confusion in multi-figure scenes, like the garden party, where the camera doesn’t lead the eye and you may miss significant actions.

Monsieur Hulot himself is not the conventional protagonist of pre-1930 silent comedies. He does not instigate activity or incident like Charlie Chaplin’s cheeky tramp. Instead, Hulot remains passive, deferential and absent-minded throughout, a good-natured figure to whom things accidentally happen.[27] In keeping with this manner, Hulot does not collide with authority. In a Chaplin film there would be a confrontation with police; with Buster Keaton there would be difficulties with a civic official; and Harold Lloyd would have a moralising minister to contend with. These encounters propelled silent comedy, and were the cornerstone of slapstick. Tati has no need of them, the only appearance of authority involving a couple of motorcycle cops watching for stray dogs.

Nor does Hulot turn and face the cinema audience. Again this runs contrary to the early customs of silent comedy, where at key moments the protagonist will face the camera and, through gesture, address the viewer. With Chaplin it’s a form of wink, a shared delight when he is on a winning streak; while Keaton turns on us his stone face, that look of fatal resignation when events conspire against him. A connection is made between audience and comic lead. But Tati has no need of this. Hulot is blissfully unaware of being watched.

The Arpels’ unquenchable appetite for status symbols leads to some sly Gallic jests about cars. When the story begins, Monsieur Arpel drives a dour grey Simca Vedette, a middle-range French-made car which could be bettered. Likewise he garages it in a bland utilitarian shed across the garden from the family home. The Arpels separately organise surprises for each other as their wedding anniversary approaches. Monsieur Arpel purchases a new American-manufactured Chrysler New Yorker, a three-toned statement in automotive flamboyance, all green and pink and purple duco with lots of gleaming chrome trim. Meanwhile, his wife has arranged for an electric door, fitted with stylish porthole windows and anodised aluminium surrounds, to be installed in the home garage. At the exchange of gifts, the couple are over the moon with their costly indulgences.

Even if you don’t grasp the make of cars, there is no missing the point when the family dog (a pedigree dachshund, no less) accidentally trips the electric eye that controls the new door, firmly locking the distressed couple inside the garage. They are trapped in their lifestyle.

Hulot cannot afford a car. He strolls around instead; although when required to get somewhere urgently he hops onto a gauche VéloSoleX moped, and later makes a hasty escape by hitching a ride on the horse cart of a rag-and-bone man. Nor does Hulot admire the Arpels’ expensive new car when taken for a spin. It’s just a thing to him. When Monsieur Arpel proudly offers him a cigarette lighter from the dashboard, Hulot uncomprehendingly tosses it out of the car’s open window after lighting his pipe.

For viewers there was already a touch of nostalgia to Hulot’s means of transport.[28] In Tati’s previous film, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, he puttered along in a 1924 Amilcar. A more hilarious automobile cannot be imagined that this 30-horsepower French jalopy with its backfires, squishy brakes and seeming mind-of-its-own. Small pieces drop from the engine when it wobbles and bumps across cobblestones. Then, shrimping net fixed to the chassis like a chevalier’s pennant, it wheezingly fails to crest a gentle hill. However, local audiences would have recognised the Amilcar as a lethal contraption that could do 75 kilometres an hour. Isadora Duncan had been killed in the sports model when her long fluttering scarf caught in the rear spoked wheels, jerking her out of the vehicle and onto the roadway where she fractured her skull.

This is where a Gallic humour eases in. Paris in mid-century had the highest automotive accident rate in the world. Roads across France were an anarchic shambles. Partly this was due to outdated road laws. Abstract doctrines of inalienable rights unaltered since the Napoleonic Code caused a disastrous organisation of traffic movement. Mix these with French attitudes of entitlement and a universal delight in evading the law, and the result was driver behaviour that cut a bloody band across society.[29]

The personalities affected by road accidents tell us much. Albert Camus was killed in a car crash. So, too, were his publisher Michel Gallimard, the talented composer Louis Cahuzac, and the rising popular novelist Jean Bruce. The elderly sculptor Aristide Maillol was killed when his speeding car rolled in a thunderstorm. The art dealer Ambrose Vollard was fatally injured in his chauffeur-driven car after it took a junction too fast and somersaulted lengthwise. The actress Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s older sister) was immolated when she lost control of her Renault 10 and it flipped off the road then erupted in flames. The novelist François Sagan was crippled after speeding in her Aston-Martin. Simone de Beauvoir, a reckless veteran of numerous crashes, nearly lost her life when rounding a bend at speed on the wrong side of the road in her Simca Aronde. She clipped a truck coming in the opposite direction (her biographer Deirdre Bair had the gall to write that the other driver struck her).[30] In her worst accident, Beauvoir hit and killed a pedestrian walking on the pavement.[31] Even the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who did not drive, had a permanent limp after being hit by a speeding car while crossing a Parisian square.

Tati himself had several collisions, the nastiest in May 1955 when he cut in front of a coach in his Peugeot Frégate. He was rushed to hospital with a double fracture of his left arm, a broken knee, a bruised chest and concussion. Tati’s hair went grey and he never recovered full rotation of his left wrist, having to wear his watch on his right arm. While resting and undergoing physiotherapy for six months he penned the sketch that evolved into Mon Oncle.

Set these facts about driver behaviour against the street traffic in the film, which smoothly flows in an automotive version of social conformism. This is hardly the French pandemonium Tati would reconfigure as marvellous disarray in his late film Trafic of 1971. Instead, to the sound of a steady drum patter, Mon Oncle has evenly spaced cars move in unison on lanes of a broad clean roadway like formation dancers. They cut such a trim pattern in motion.

And there is so little variety in the modern vehicles shown. Tati had used a mix of old and recent, expensive and economical cars travelling along the highway in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. But here is such sameness in the endless rows and columns of cream, grey and white French 1950s cars. The modern roads are filled with sedans and coupes favoured by white collar employees and professionals; makes including Simca, Peugeot, Panhard, Renault, Autobleu and a Marathon with its swept polyester bodywork. Absent are the ubiquitous Citroën 2CV and Renault 4CV, those low-cost staples of the local automotive industry; while the only traffic incidents, a rear-end bump and splashing pedestrians, are caused by battered old vehicles. What we are shown on these modern roads is not Parisian traffic. Mon Oncle is the dream of an efficiently run and socially aspirational “progressive” city.

Mon Oncle has a frank interest in idleness. The people in the old quarter where Hulot lives do very little, apart from socialising. There is the neighbour downstairs who doesn’t bother to dress, drifting sleepily to the café in pyjama pants and singlet, and the street vendor who lounges at a table with a glass of wine, allowing customers to select vegetables from his barrow across the square. Foremost among these idlers is a municipal street-sweeper, who may be busy all day, although he doesn’t clear the square. Not once do we see his birch broom sweep the cobblestones. Instead, his working hours are spent gossiping with passers-by as he hovers over an unshifting pile of litter.

Idlers were a favourite topic of conversation when Jacques Tati and Raymond Queneau got together. The pair would regale others with their opinions that the right to do nothing much is a fundamental freedom of ordinary folk; and they scoffed at prevailing attitudes that only the rich are entitled to inactivity.[32] Tati and Queneau even contended that idleness can be politically meaningful. The film Tati had originally wanted to make—about French labourers fouling up German wartime production—would have been a comic salute to idleness, proving that self-exclusion from the economy of labour is the noblest form of resistance.[33]

French viewers recognised that Hulot retains some of the mannerisms of a wartime zazou. Unheroic, lazy and anarchic, the zazous were younger Parisians of the Occupation years who vented their opposition to Vichy, the Germans and compliant authority through insolent idleness.[34] Zazous slowed down the workplace, talking and getting staff to take breaks. Zazous dressed casual to sloppy, often cutting trousers at the shin to display vile striped socks. They disrupted the neighbourhood by playing decadent jazz records loudly with windows open. Hulot, we should notice, has those high-cut trouser legs, those visible striped socks, that habit of annoying others with rag-time records played at full blast. He did it all in Tati’s previous film, too, where the character wore throughout the favoured zazou footwear: sandshoes.

The hints of a 1940s zazou underline Hulot’s easygoing nature, whereas conventional attitudes to idleness are refracted through the Arpels. If they view Hulot’s idleness as an embarrassment, they do admire the idle woman next door—because she exudes wealth. These same attitudes clarify Monsieur Arpel’s unease over Gerard’s relationship with his uncle. At home the father encourages his son to work and study, where the cheerful Hulot allows the boy to muck about and be idle. Likewise with Hulot’s lack of employment. Monsieur Arpel is pleasant and well meaning, although he values industriousness and ambition, so he simply cannot understand his jobless brother-in-law’s contentment.

Of course, that chirpy street sweeper who never sweeps begs to be set against Madame Arpel, who compulsively cleans and tidies everything in sight. She cannot stop. When she first appears she is vacuuming, then as Monsieur Arpel prepares to leave for work she buffs his shiny leather briefcase. He starts his car and moves off, then she scampers alongside, zealously polishing the chrome and duco. Madame Arpel fusses over things that are spotless throughout the film.

Surely the funniest images of idleness in Mon Oncle follow the arrival of Monsieur Arpel and his dog at the plastics plant late in the film. The dachshund trots on well ahead of his owner, and the staff spring into activity, knowing their boss is following. No one in the factory works until that dog passes by, not technicians or labourers or typists. Except for Hulot. He is carrying boxes—until he sees Arpel’s dog. Then Hulot halts and gets down on the floor playfully to greet the dachshund. Around a corner swings Monsieur Arpel, pleased that his staff are so productive, only to spy his brother-in-law sprawled upon the floor, idle again!

Film history treats Jacques Tati as an outsider, a figure never assimilated into the profession. There is good reason for seeing his maverick comedies as disconnected from the motion picture industry; however, thematic threads surely link his Jour de Fête (1949), Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958) with European cinema of the period.

That suspicion of progress, and Tati’s stress on small-town values, weaves through a sequence of post-war Italian films, including Shoeshine, Germania Anno Zero, Bicycle Thieves, La Terra Trembla and Umberto D. The impoverished family of Bicycle Thieves even lives in a cheerless mass-housing estate. These disturbing films also depict community values under threat in a modern world which cites progress to excuse mercenary manipulation. The audience watches common decency ground down by unfeeling administrators and unseen companies—a dramatic formula for the grim fatalism now categorised as “Neo-Realism”.

English comedies, especially the Ealing productions, come closest to Tati’s approach. Films such as Passport to Pimlico, Whiskey Galore!, The Titfield Thunderbolt, The Smallest Show on Earth and Rockets Galore similarly hinge on community resistance to modernisation. These comedies represent small, earthy communities where people are sustained by neighbourliness, and progress is equated with moral and spiritual decay.

In this vein, quirkier English films revere vintage machines and buildings. The renowned Titfield Thunderbolt, an antiquated and decrepit steam engine, is as comical as Monsieur Hulot’s Amilcar. And the Bijou Cinema of The Smallest Show on Earth is even more ramshackle than Hulot’s home in Mon Oncle. In a cinematic version of the pathetic fallacy, both the Titfield Thunderbolt and the Bijou Cinema are portrayed as having character traits: the local community speaks of them possessing a sort of charming dodderiness. Old rundown things are cherished for the human qualities they encapsulate.

Like the Ealing comedies, Mon Oncle fears the waning of a village culture. Indeed, there is an unintended symmetry to Jacques Tati’s three principal films—Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1954), Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1966)—which sequentially draw the audience from one epoch to the next, that is, from old France to modern Europe. And their cumulative effect is a gentle sadness as community-oriented values decline in an urgent rush to modernise.

This European mistrust of progress was anathema to Hollywood. In post-war American cinema, instead of being a threat to the small-town community, progress is represented as salvation. Only the corrupt hinder the forces of progress. This is the overt message of numerous westerns, culminating in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that film the greenhorn Ransom Stoddard cannot work a farm, cannot ride a horse, cannot handle a six-shooter: but, as the agent of change, he is the positive figure. The future prosperity of the frontier town, and the broader territory, entirely hinges on his overcoming a figure symbolising the Old West, the thieving gunslinger Liberty Valance.

If Mon Oncle weighs against progress, Tati does not exaggerate or sermonise. He refrains from unsettling his audience. Unlike films that would appear in the next five years—with the oppressive cityscapes of Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini—there is no unease in his streets, not a hint of moodiness or anguish.[35] Nor is the imposed rationality of the modernist city the work of demons as in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville of 1965, or a figment of the character’s disturbed mind as in Orson Welles’s 1963 adaptation of The Trial. Even when Tati moves on to shoot an entire high-rise metropolis, with his next film Playtime, the impression conveyed to the audience is of monotony. Contemporary foyers, offices and flats are identical, anonymous and lack character.

In Tati’s view the modern city is not a menace. It is over-ordered, and therefore boring. This is brought out in Playtime’s nightclub sequence. Patrons in the smart club go through the ritual motions of leisure and pleasure, until Hulot is accidentally borne in with a crowd. Then the chaotic fun begins.

When Mon Oncle was released in 1958 the critical reaction in Paris was mixed. Leading the negative voices was François Truffaut. He had previously extolled Tati’s work, classing the maverick director as an “auteur” whose singular output was not compromised by industry conventions (which provoked intellectual curiosity, and all manner of curious philosophical writings on his comedies).[36] This time the young critic argued that Tati had produced an uninteresting film by keeping his action plausible. Other reviewers joined in, complaining that Mon Oncle was formless because it lacked a customary conflict, climax and resolution. Some suggested Tati was a reactionary in refusing to accept progress, and revelling in nostalgia. For them, Hulot was a form of Luddite at odds with modern technology—although the historian James Harding points out that this is not evident in Mon Oncle.[37]

Perhaps their impatience was because French film had reached a turning point. Within twelve months Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour would appear on local movie screens. A cinematic new wave, as it would be dubbed, was about to usher in an energised fascination for detective stories, Coca Cola, jukeboxes, blue jeans and popular culture.

Nevertheless, the press loved Mon Oncle. It struck a warm chord with French audiences, too, viewers acclaiming Tati’s tender comedy for articulating their feelings about a changing way of life. Beyond its jokes the film dealt in social stresses touching everybody. Domestic cinema attendances reached two million, and kept climbing. Enthusiasm built as the film travelled to other countries. Fan mail arrived from around the world. Mon Oncle won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and a coveted New York Film Critics Circle award. And there was an excursion to Hollywood to attend the Academy Award ceremony, where Mon Oncle had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

After Tati took the Oscar an eager American journalist offered to line up a meeting with Jerry Lewis. The French director couldn’t care less. Asked who from the movie industry he would like to see, Tati replied, “Mack Sennett.” The reporter was unfamiliar with the name. Still, true to his word, he tracked down the veteran silent movie director at a Santa Monica nursing home. A meal was organised. On the day, Jacques Tati arrived at the appointed time to find Sennett had invited along three other elderly fans: Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. The French director was handed a glass of champagne, then the distinguished company toasted the meandering exploits of Monsieur Hulot.