Chelsea the Cinéaste

  Having left his sister’s family at the end of  Mon Oncle  (1958), a bittersweet coda which I take to symbolise in some way the irretrievable loss of an age of innocence, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s beloved and bumbling alter ego, finds himself amongst other ill-adapted, increasingly mechanised denizens in a near-futuristic Paris -  Playtime  (1967), Tati’s penultimate full-length feature and arguably his best, involved a constructed set so lavish and enormous that the director was near bankrupt when he finished the film, three years after its start date. The so-called “Tativille” blends the Kafkesque with an impersonal internationalism; the scope of vision is at once grand and restrictive - there is space within a wide interior space and, as evidenced by a now canonical image of Hulot overlooking a grid of office cubicles (this anticipated by at least 20 years the dominance of such design), each inhabitant of the space seems contented and in a way codepende...

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 invariabl...