Mon oncle

With Mon oncle (1958), Jacques Tati brought Monsieur Hulot into colour and into open, affectionate conflict with the modern world. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a special prize at Cannes, cementing Tati's standing as one of cinema's great comic architects and his most internationally celebrated work.

The comedy turns on a contrast of spaces: Hulot's crooked, sociable old Paris neighbourhood, full of markets, café chatter and stray dogs, set against the sterile geometry of his sister's gadget-filled modernist villa, with its absurd fish-shaped fountain switched on only for important guests. Tati, again directing and starring, stages his gags in long, deep-focus takes, letting the absurdities of consumer modernity reveal themselves through impeccable sound design and visual timing rather than dialogue. The house itself becomes the film's finest comic performer.

A gentle satire of post-war affluence and the tyranny of the labour-saving device, Mon oncle was both a popular success and a critical landmark, and it set the stage for Tati's even more radical and ruinous PlayTime. Warm where it might have been merely clever, and never cruel to the people caught up in its gleaming machines, it remains one of the most pleasurable critiques of modern life ever filmed — a comedy that sides, finally, with clutter, accident, leisure and human warmth.