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Tati: Celebrating France's comic genius
PARIS: Newly restored copies of Jacques Tati's 1958 masterpiece "Mon Oncle" My Uncle including an original English version missing for decades, premiered in Paris on Wednesday, part of the run up to a centennial celebration of France's great comic film genius. Inspired by the silent era gags of Buster Keaton and the wry humour W.C. Fields, both giants of American comedy, Tati forged in the 1940s and 1950s a comic universe all his own. At its centre is Tati's alter ego and anti-modern hero, the unflappable, unfailingly polite Monsieur Hulot. Armed with his signature pipe and trench coat, the gracefully bumbling Hulot embodies for Tati a noble, but losing struggle against the dehumanizing forces of modern management and unbridled consumerism. In "Mon Oncle," the second in a quartet of Hulot films spanning two decades, these corrupting trends are embodied in our hero's brother-in-law and sister, he a preening executive in a rubber hose factory, she a fastidious housewife reigning over an austere and ultra-automated modern house ripped straight from the pages of a trendy architecture magazine. The unemployed Hulot lives in a makeshift, rooftop apartment in a run-down part of town full of scruffy dogs and even scruffier children, a real French neighbourhood where lifelong neighbours bargain and bicker in the market, and greet every passer-by. This is Tati's paradise, an endangered natural habitat soon to be steam-rollered by the American-inspired forces of Progress with a capital "P." His Hulot feels out of place in this sterile brave new world, expressing not so much contempt, but bewilderment at its misplaced values. "You don't seem to be able to adjust," his brother-in-law says with a mix of exasperation and pity when Hulot gets himself fired after one day at the rubber hose factory. Tati's films are short of plot and even shorter on dialogue, driven instead by painstaking composition of image, an original use of sound and a visual comedies-of-error that never fail to surprise. But "Mon Oncle" does have a dramatic core, the struggle for the soul of Hulot's young nephew Gerard, chided by his humourless parents for exactly the qualities Hulot encourages by his very being: Playfulness, humility, joie de vivre. The English version thought to be lost until a tattered copy was found by accident and restored is more than a curiosity, and Tati spent a year in post-production making it. Much of what is lampooned in "Mon Oncle" came from the late 1950's America of big, shiny cars and full-throated consumerism, and Tati clearly intended to confront the Anglo-Saxon world with his judgment on its excesses. The film was, in fact, both a critical and a commercial success, garnering the special jury prize at the Cannes film festival in 1958 and a best foreign film Oscar the following year. The rights to the entire Tati oeuvre were purchased not long ago by relatives and friends of the film-maker, who died in 1982 penniless after his later films critically acclaimed flopped at the box office. Their association (www.tativille.com) is refurbishing his work reel-by-reel, partly in preparation for the 2007 centennial of his birth, when Tati's comic genius will be celebrated in various events around the world.
(China Daily 07/09/2005 page9)
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