David Hast: Scott, have you seen Mon Oncle?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen Mon Oncle and I've seen that and Playtime by director and movie comedian Jacques Tati.
DH: Yes, Jacques Tati. Mon Oncle is my favorite movie from him. Jacques Tati only made six feature films from 1949 to 1974, but he had a style all his own. There is no one like Tati. He created a unique brand of movie comedy, tons of physical gags, visual surprises in his sets and his art direction and his photography, which is very interesting, and fascinating sound effects as well.
SVW: And his films also are in a way they do pay tribute to the Hollywood, the early Hollywood silent stars, Chaplin, Buster Keaton and people like that as well.
DH: Yeah, completely. Tahti was a master of physical comedy. You he started off in the French equivalent of vaudeville doing mime and clowning and stage stuff. And he totally carries on the tradition of silent comedians and filmmakers, I think especially Buster Keaton.
SVW: Oh, I could see that, yeah. Because Keaton would set things up. He would actually choreograph what was the action that was going to happen around his own physical self and react to that or not react to that.
DH: Yeah, and that's what happens in these four of his six features have this character. Monsieur Hulot, and he's played by Tati himself, right? So Tati wrote and directed these movies and he plays the Monsieur Hulot character. And this includes Mon Oncle, my uncle, which is the one we talked about at the beginning, which is my favorite. And the one that most critics usually cite is the greatest, which is called Playtime. And Monsieur Hulot is this free spirit who goes around, he walks funny, he wears this trench coat, carries an umbrella…
SVW: …and Oh, he's as a pipe. Oh, of course. And he wears a distinctive hat as well.
DH: Yeah, thank you. That's Mr. Hulot. So in the tradition of Chaplain or Keaton, right, finding a character. And he's this guy who things just happen to that are funny, or he accidentally causes crazy things to happen to other people.
SVW: And also the films also reveal a sort of conflict between the traditional old world and the new postmodern world. the post-World War II world.
DH: Very much. So in all the movies with Monsieur Hulot, Tati shines this skeptical light on the modern world with its ugly buildings and mass production of stupid products. He shows it as kind of cold and soulless and he shows how modern life makes people behave ridiculously because they care so much about convenience and order and their possessions. And all this makes great material for all kinds of comic images and stuff because he's got you know people dealing with wacky machines that won't do what they want to do and factories that churn out crazy products that aren't working right and
SVW: Furniture that looks really cool but it's actually not serviceable
DH: Yeah Mon Oncle they have this incredibly modern furniture in Mon Oncle basically this and other thing about these movies is they have very little plot they're mostly just series of gags right
Mon Oncle probably has the most plot where Mr. Olo is he's the uncle to this little kid and so it's then there's his sister the adults of the kids parents are his sister and his brother-in-law and they live in this Super modern automated house
SVW: That's always actually breaking down as well throughout the movie
DH: and the things that this house does right like what is the kitchen like what did you like I
SVW: I cannot I still don't understand everything that was going on in the kitchen
DH: Yeah, there's just all these crazy automated things. She goes to this incredibly complex thing to make a hardboiled egg for the kid. And then they've got this hideous like everything they have is incredibly neat. Like there isn't like a leaf on the ground, right? Everything has to be perfect.
SVW: And if in the first sequence, it’s the mother and the sister of Michelle Huloh, who's basically cleaning everything in the wake of her husband leaving for work.
DH: Yeah, and they've obviously got this ritual where she carries his briefcase out for him and she's dusting everything. She dusts the handle of the car as he gets in, she dusts the car as it drives by. And then they've got this horrific, horrifying fish fountain that they only turn on for special people. So someone rings at the gate, she quickly turns on the fish fountain because it's special, and then she sees that it's her brother, so she turns it off.
SVW: And the other thing is that the layout of the yard is like a maze.
DH: Yeah, and they've got these like stepping stones that you're supposed to have to walk on, which are incredibly awkward. He's just completely making fun of modernism and the modern world. And it leads to a million different funny gags and crazy stuff happening and funny sounds. Taty has an incredibly great use of soundtrack. But...He's got, you know, there's a little bit of a serious message behind it because what Jauque Tati really loved and you can see it in the movies is he loves genuine simpler things, old things, the old old neighborhoods with cafes and unpretentious people and things made by hand and not just unpretentious people,
SVW: But they're all living together as well.
DH: And Tati actually said, I read an interview, and he said in the old days, people used to have more fun and they were more generous. They weren't always, they weren't just like completely preoccupied with, you know, and the modern world we're seeing in this movie, right? This is 1958. So this is kind of old by today's standards, but you can multiply this by a hundred now, because now it's not even things anymore. Now we're all captive of just like digitization, just like virtual stuff.
SVW: And the brother-in-law who is one of the heads of a rubber factory, He and his friends, all they ever talk about is business and finance. That's all they talk about.
DH: Right. And they're cars. And Tati loves doing things with cars. He has an entire movie, Traffic, basically about cars, and the movie Playtime has a lot of cars in it. And he just shows how ridiculous the whole system of cars and traffic is.
SVW: But in Mon Oncle, the big comparison in terms of the old and the new is where the Manchurhulo, where he lives. Now I have to say this though, as much as he's satirizing and lampooning the modern world, he's also poking fun at his neighbors who are living in the old world as well. He's poking fun at them too in terms of the tone of the movie.
DH: Yeah, I mean he certainly shows that things aren't practical, right? Like the building he lives in, they show you him walking from the ground level up like three stories winding back and forth. You see him as he passes by a window each time and it's this incredibly complicated way to get up there. So yeah, you know, but it's kind of, it’s genuine. It's just like it was built by people with their hands, you know, and... And it looks lived in. Right. Another thing he very much loves, he always portrays children sympathetically as really genuine and he loves dogs. Right in Mr. Rula in Mon Oncle dogs open and close the movie
SVW: Not only do they open and close the movie but they're throughout the film and in fact I think one of the things that he's doing is that he's showing that there's not that much difference between these pack of dogs and all the humans that he shows.
DH: Yeah except that the dogs act naturally so that the dogs are more like maybe what we admire in humans right
SVW: And the nephew and his friends are running around town amusing themselves as well.
DH: Right, and then you see that's what he likes. He likes when they're just running through open fields, when they're playing practical jokes on people, but when the nephew gets back to his home, his modern home, then he has to act completely perfect like his mother wants things to be.
SVW: You can see that he's uncomfortable there and he doesn't like it as much and as soon as his uncle shows up, he's happy.
DH: So you saw Playtime 2, didn't you?
SVW: I saw Playtime too and I had seen that decades ago and that is an amazing film where Tati actually built a miniature city outside of Paris and to do this film which took over nine years.
DH: Yeah and this movie really really shows. This movie is often cited by critics as his greatest film. My personal favorite is Mon Oncle because it's more fun but this is a masterpiece Playtime and it just has such meticulously, carefully constructed, precise production design and photography. I mean, he took nine years to make this movie. And at the time it was actually the most expensive movie ever made because he built all this stuff.
SVW: And it was on 70-millimeter film as well.
DH: Right. It was shot on 70 millimeter and it's kind of ironic because he loves the old world and he loves the old movies but he's really invented a new kind of movie that's in some ways much more advanced than some of the others that were being made.
SVW: And in terms of how the movie moves, it moves with huge crowds of people. There's always a throng of people in playtime. And the character of Hulo is basically, he's kind of, he's there, but he's also not there through much of the movie.
DH: Yeah, and then there's fake Hulots, right?
SVW: Yeah, there are fake Hulots.
DH: Yeah, in a way he...Tati in interviews actually said he didn't care that much. He didn't want Lolo to be the main character He's just sort of a guy who moves through the different spaces So sort of a reference point but again, there's not much of a plot to play time and we should talk about the dialogue in his movies It's almost incidental that nothing much really gets developed of characters or what they have to say but the sounds that he uses sound effects and so forth are great
SVW: And there's English dialogue in in playtime because there are English characters, there are American characters that are part of the movie.
DH: Yeah, and that's true in his later movie, that, Traffic as well. He's pretty cosmopolitan and international in the way he shows the world.
SVW: But in terms of talking about Mon Onkel, there's more dialogue in that film than there is in Playtime. Playtime, it's not really even dialogue. It's just people talking in groups and you don't really focus in on what they're saying so much. It's all the visuals.
DH: Yeah, there is no plot in Playtime.
SVW: But there are set pieces. You have the set piece at the beginning the airport and then that leads to the hotel and then that leads to what's going on briefly in the city then we get to the restaurant and there's the restaurant almost takes up half the movie
DH: Yeah, it's very anarchy. It's not my favorite thing in the movie I like the earlier stuff where he shows that the airport and then this big business building which are just it's just amazing how they're shut there like all the design in that it's all very steely gray and blue.
SVW: Lots of glass.
DH: You hear people's like heels on the hard floors clicking from a distance and all his sound was done in post-production. He shot completely without microphones and without sound to give him complete control over the sound later on.
SVW: And one of the things about Playtime, there's this group of American tourists who are in it from the beginning to the end. And there's a woman named Barbara who is part of the group of tourists and she's entranced by things like a woman selling flowers at a street corner and she says, this is the real France. But then when she goes and opens up one of the glass doors, you can see the reflection of the Eiffel Tower. It's like these tourists never actually visit the real Paris.
DH: Yeah, it's been pointed out that in playtime you never really see Paris except at occasionally when a...in a reflection, you see reflection of the Eiffel Tower or another famous building. But then what we see where everything takes place is just in these ugly buildings.
SVW: And then there's the sequence where Monsieur Hulot runs into a friend of his who he served in the military with during World War II. And he takes him into his apartment, which is a glass fronted apartment. And it's a series of apartments. And you don't hear anything that they're saying or anything that anybody else is saying. You just hear the street sounds and watch what they're doing in this glass apartment.
DH: Yeah, and the apartments, mean, they don't make sense. This wouldn't be real, right? Because these are like apartments that are at ground level or the floor above on a main street. Like if it was on, you know, an avenue in New York City or on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, I mean, and they have no curtains or anything. So these big picture windows and you just see right into their apartment, people walking by on a busy city street.
SVW: It's like humans in a zoo. Well, and then also one of the things that was kind of interesting in terms of, again, he's poking fun at people throughout his movies. And in terms of the, some of the character of Barbara, he’s kind of poking fun at her a little bit, but it's also, she's shown as being sort of endearing. And in fact, Monsieur Hulot at the end gives her a gift, which he's actually not able to give to her personally, and that's part of the comedy of the movie. But there's also the characters that are the ugly Americans, who are there boisterous, more boisterous than they need to be.
DH: Yeah. So, I mean, these films are, it's funny, I've talked to some people who've seen these movies and didn't really like them much. If you are someone that really need a story, an engaging story, Tati wouldn't be for you. He doesn't have plots; he doesn't have character development.
SVW: Well, I have to say, for me, I'd seen Tati decades ago. I enjoyed him when I saw Playtime back in the 80s. I went to see it again, within the last 15 years or so and didn't enjoy it as much in fact I took it out of I watched it on DVD and took it out. But this time I enjoyed both my uncle and playtime, but the humor became accumulative for me It's not the familiar type of humor that you're used to even with like the old slap slapstick Hollywood movies either you have to it's almost like you have to learn to understand the humor involved.
DH: Yeah, in these two especially. If you want to see the really more slapstick stuff, see Mr. Hulo's Holidays second film.
SVW: He's a filmmaker who choreographs his movies in a completely unique way. If you haven't seen any of his films, you've really never seen his type of filmmaking.
