I keep thinking about the dogs in this film, how Jacques Tati
the director makes them the stand-in for Mr. Hulot the character when he’s not
around. They are guileless, curious,
carefree things, and they don’t always know the destruction they leave in their
wake. In the opening of Mon Oncle, we follow them from the old
quarter to the suburbs, foreshadowing Hulot’s visit there in much the same way
the wind blows through the door creating havoc just before he enters the hotel
in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953). There is also a dog at the beginning of that
movie, lazily blocking the road leading into the tiny vacation town. We see Hulot’s hand reach out of his car to
pet the dog long before we see his face.
We can’t help, in either film, but connect Hulot’s simple, innocent
energy with the sweetness of animals that also depend so much on the kindness
of strangers. There’s a moment in Mon Oncle when Hulot, working for his
sister’s husband, Mr. Arpel, at Arpel’s rubber hose factory, lays down flat on
the floor to play with a dog that runs away before Arpel rounds the corner,
making it seem like Hulot is just lounging there. Hulot never knows Arpel sees this or that
he’s making yet another sour assumption about Hulot’s laziness. Likewise, when Arpel’s secretary sees
footprints in her office that lead to the window overlooking her bathroom,
prints that belong to Hulot via wholly innocent means, he never understands why
she’s shooing him out so gruffly. It’s
not that Hulot is missing a brain, it’s simply that the world is judging him while
he carries an almost determined lack of need to make any sort of impression
whatsoever. His sister says his head is
in the clouds, but that’s not fair – his head is right here, observing always,
absorbing everything, adjusting things for the better (see him move a window
pane to move a ray of sunshine onto a singing bird), but forever finding himself
in situations that are in baroque contrast to his easily pleased and happily
accommodating disposition.
When we see the extreme contrast of Hulot’s unkempt
neighborhood and the ultra-modern home of the Arpels, we know that Mon Oncle is a step forward from his
previous movie’s simple scheme of sight gag set up and payoff and toward a
particular brand of social commentary (though a long stride behind Playtime’s grandly poetic, intricately
choreographed perimortem of urban living).
Hulot’s is a rustic, unchanged world of unwashed buildings, sidewalk
cafés, open-air markets, street sweepers, and horse-drawn carts. Inside Tati’s typically large, deep-focus
frame, we see the bustling life of the lower class, stray conversations in the
dusty street, haggling over prices – general life, presented as a bubbling
ballet of activity. While across town,
in the suburbs, the Arpels proudly boast the newest in everything – home
design, gadgets, garage doors, cars, clothes… and fish-shaped fountains. We’re presented with these differences and left
to deduce the bankrupt tedium of modern straight lines, imposed style, and the
illusion that the newer way to do something (like boil an egg) is automatically
better. But these trappings of financial
success aren’t presented in any malicious or dark way – the Hulot persona won’t
let it get that far. We may sense in
Hulot’s bemused reaction to these objects and surroundings a kind of curious
distrust of the fancy, and we might take away from his awkwardness that, just
maybe, the closer we get to clean and streamlined, the further we get from
experience itself. But it’s never shown,
as far as Hulot is concerned. Where we
actually get something closer to pronounced commentary is in the boredom of the
Arpels’ young son, Gerard, who, surrounded by the exact opposite of a boy’s
ideal playground in this near-empty, soulless home, exhibits a dry, quietly
nursing cynicism that takes the form of repeatedly leaning his head onto his
palm like a pint-sized Groucho. Gerard
is the nephew implied by the film’s title, and he is given over to Hulot’s care
for part of the movie. It’s only then
that we see the boy come to life. Hulot
is essentially the same in all situations, but Gerard changes when released
from the confines of his drearily bright and shiny home, making him the film’s
truest, if quietest, conduit for the joys of the past, the warmth of
nostalgia.
Hulot is socially fixed in amber, a maladroit throwback, never
not halting, and it’s fun watching the Arpels spend time and social capital of
their own trying to assimilate him into “normalcy” – Mr. Arpel by setting him
up with a decent job at his factory and Mrs. Arpel by setting him up with the
woman next door. The blind date at the
Arpels’ front yard dinner party is a major set piece that at once catalogues
the many ways polite society can be a quiet sham and illustrates the
impossibility of a man like Hulot ever fitting into that world. He is the epitome of the misfit character:
but he’s not possessed by an iconoclastic rage against the system, nor is this
a scathing parody of modern life. The
film is neither a send-up nor a take-down.
It falls somewhere in between: Hulot is just a man so naturally
unimpressed with the system that any time he’s standing up next to it, his
isolated self-sufficiency is a pointed indictment against it. Hulot could be the past before it ever knew
it wanted to be the future.
But, all of these internal themes aside, if you prefer, you
can simply soak up the film’s many external joys, meted out via Tati’s
brilliant mastery of composition and use of sound. In one of my favorite shots, early in the
movie, we see the entirety of the front of the three-story building where Hulot
lives – a large, flat, diorama-type shot that could be the progenitor of a
million Wes Anderson shots – and we watch through windows as he slowly makes
his way from the ground floor, up several flights of stairs, across halls,
through walkways, until he finally reaches his apartment on the top floor. By the time we get to this shot, Tati has
drawn us well into his way of seeing the world – Hulot’s physical movement, and
the behavior of most of the characters in all his films, is an intentional
pantomime that invites us to set it apart from reality, and yet his clear
enjoyment in showing the character’s unfazed nonchalance at having to take this
long course up to his home every day, more than once, infuses the moment with a
buoyancy that carries over into the rest of the film. We know instinctively that Hulot is not the
kind who will judge others for choosing a fancier life. Instead, we sense he carries his love for
movement and life and interaction with the world into even those areas he can’t
fathom are necessary.
If there’s a down side to Tati’s style, it’s that his films
adhere so rigorously to this outside-looking-in approach, we’re left always the
observer, never a participant, so a Hulot film does not generate pathos. Hulot creates emotions in the characters
around him – there are the annoyed hurrumphs of vacationers in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and the head-shaking
disapproval of the Arpels in Mon Oncle
– but we, the audience, are at a distance and are not particularly moved beyond
knowing chuckles (and sometimes outright laughter). And yet, I would say Tati has constructed
films that are perhaps the apotheosis of the observational film, because outside
of the laughter created by watching a man so ill-fitted to the world around
him, the greatest effect of watching a Tati movie is the way the submersion
into his hyper-stylized point of view makes us, for a time, see our own reality
differently. After a two-hour stay
inside one of his movies, you can look out the window, watch a workman park a
little truck curbside and change a light in a lamppost… but you can’t do it
without newly realizing the fluidity of his movement and the funny beauty
inherent in the tableaux of a small human being interacting with his huge environment. For me, this is Tati’s gift to the world, the
gentle imposition of a view of life that is curious about it, aware of its
potential to overwhelm, but enchanted by its never-ending poetry.
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