Mon Oncle (1958)

Jacques Tati's second Monsieur Hulot film and winner of the best foreign film Oscar. This is a charming film focusing on the relationship between Hulot and his roughly six year old nephew. It is also a satire on 'modern' (1950's) French life. In the first shots of the film we see a pack of small dogs make there way form a warm, lived in, and slightly dilapidated old neighbourhood into a modernistic one, sterile, empty, artificial.

Hulot lives in the old neighborhood, a friendly place with vegetable carts, open air cafes and children playing in the streets. His nephew lives with his family in the new neighbourhood, one that is fastley encroaching on the old. The nephews family live in an ultra modernistic, uncomfortable seeming house. Even the yard is complicatedly laid out and overly manicured, the setting for the funniest dinner party scene I can think off.

Hulot's sister and brother-in-law desire to make him respectable, meaning part of their social circle. They try to set him up with a neighbour and get him a job in a rubber house factory, suffice it to say none of these things turn out as they hopped. The scenes with the little boy and his friends are also pretty funny, the games they play on the adults, such as whistling while hiding in a small bluff, and wagering on whether the whistle will cause a pedestrian to walk into a light post (this happens about 50% of the time). Again, warm, light hearted, sentimental in its way and quite obviously reminiscent of Chaplin's 'modern' satire City Lights.

Grade A-