Événement

Mon Oncle @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Slapstick prevails again when Jacques Tati's eccentric, old-fashioned hero, Monsieur Hulot, is set loose in Villa Arpel, the geometric, oppressively ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in the antiseptic plastic-hose factory where he gets a job. The second Hulot movie and Tati's first color film, "Mon Oncle" is a supremely amusing satire of mechanized living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Describing "Mon Oncle" as "pure, abstract slapstick, full of delightful visual wit, droll physical humor, and Gallic irony," critic and programmer James Quandt writes: "In this hyperdesigned satire about the impersonality, tedium, and sterility of modern life, Tati plays the uncle of the title, whose sister is married to Monsieur Arpel, a plastics manufacturer. The Arpels live in a white horror of hygienic perfection, with a pristine yard, an arsenal of gadgets, and a fountain shaped like a fish that reminds one not of nature but of the factory that produced it. Importing disorder into this cold, soulless place, with its forbidding gate and garden, Hulot delights his nephew with his aptitude for accidents."

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Jean-Louis Pautrot, professor of French and international studies at St. Louis University.