Mon Oncle [My Uncle] (1958)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) As someone who started exploring “older” movies only a few years ago, one of my favourite feelings is to encounter a film so distinctive that nothing quite like it has been made ever since. Something like Mon Oncle, a satire that plays almost entirely without significant dialogue, relying on visual design and the talents of writer-director Jacques Tati as a mime. I’ll qualify my “I’ve never seen anything like this before or since,” reaction with the obvious note that this is my first Tati film—I’m aware of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play Time but haven’t gotten around to them yet. (There are also plenty of similarities, as others have noted, between Tati and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean.) Mon Oncle certainly makes a striking introduction to his work: A satire of 1950s French society taken over by American-style consumerism, this is a film that opposes two visions of France, and remains curiously timeless despite some very dated material. Tati’s background as a mime certainly shows in the film’s almost redundant dialogues, with the bulk of the film’s storytelling and comedy being handled through purely visual means. This doesn’t mean that Mon Oncle could have worked as a silent movie, though: the film’s soundscape is incredibly important in affirming the film’s atmosphere. There are a lot of slapstick gags, but perhaps just as many visual design jokes as well—the film’s cinematographic polish is incredible, and the way the film portrays an out-of-control drive toward modernism exists somewhere between words and images. (There’s a bit where the house “watches” Tati that’s almost a perfect moment of cinema.) Still, for all of the high esteem in which I regard Mon Oncle’s intentions and execution, there’s a limit to how much I actually like the result. The film often goes back to the same general ideas in more or less the same way, getting repetitive along the way. I also have… issues in the way modernism is portrayed as a soul-sucking step down from traditionalism. But then again, I’ve had sixty more years than Tati to get used to the idea.