Jacques Tati is a man of contradictions: He claimed not to have read much of anything, but his films were nevertheless embraced by France’s intellectual elite as vanguard Modernist works. He is praised in equal measure for reviving the silent comedy and revolutionizing the sound film. In his films he used state-of-the-art technology to critique a society being smothered by automation and gadgetry.
Tati is perhaps best known as and inseparable from his iconic creation M. Hulôt, who wanders silently through his four most famous features, attired in a rumpled trench coat and slouch hat, observing or (more often) inadvertently instigating comic catastrophes. Like Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Hulôt is baffled by technology and has bad luck with jobs.
In Mon Oncle he manages to nearly destroy an entire factory on his first day of work, though in all fairness the factory, which seems to be engaged in making one infinitely long hose, isn’t the most efficient operation to begin with. Infected with a clumsiness that marks his encounters with mechanical devices and people alike, Hulôt endures these humiliations with a Buster Keaton-like stone face.
