MUBI

Watched this on Mubi in preparation for seeing The Illusionist. There were no subtitles provided, so I watched the movie as if it was a silent film. From what I understand about Tati any dialog that is present is intended to be background noise. You can interpret what characters mean to say from their mannerisms and tone. The comedy is quite physical, but also auditory from extensive sound effects that must have taken great effort from a Foley artist. There are very few straightforward jokes. The humor is subtle and I appreciated it more as the film continued. From the dogs roaming free in the neighborhood, a kind of metaphor for Hulot’s simple life and perhaps the innocent youth of his nephew, to the robotic movement of cars in traffic and the other modern conveniences in the garden and home of the Arpels, you can tell that everything was very carefully planned out.

The fish fountain and the outdoor dinner party that the Arpels host is particularly enjoyable. It is a treat to see what a futuristic home looked like even in the late 1950s. The two round bedroom windows are like giant eyes on the house. Nearly everything is automated. They even have what is basically a Roomba vacuum cleaner, though with a cord. Mr. and Mrs. Arpel (she is Hulot’s sister) are very concerned with appearances as evidenced by the long process of making their front yard presentable every time someone comes to their front gate, but not very concerned with function as evidenced by the artistic pattern of stepping stones winding through their pristinely kept yard. A pleasure to watch.

Tati’s fascination with modern rituals, technological functionality, and the ever-widening divide between traditional and contemporary living is here turned into an ingenious series of disorderly situations. Like a Rube Goldberg machine that never stops, mishaps and technical glitches pervading the scene as often as Madame Arpel switches on her ridiculous fish fountain, the film is spectacularly inventive situational comedy tied to ahead-of-its-time commentary. No detail is overlooked; from the immaculately designed, mechanized impracticality of the “modern” house to the ramshackle homeliness of Monsieur Hulot’s apartment and the vision of Old Paris that surrounds it, it is a study in contrasts and carefully modulated visual gags, effortlessly mining the simple rhythms of everyday life to find the organic nonsense within it.