Mon oncle

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

The comedy turns on two kinds of space. Hulot's crooked, sociable old Paris neighbourhood, full of markets, café chatter and stray dogs, is 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 and lets the absurdities of consumer modernity reveal themselves through impeccable sound design and visual timing, with very little dialogue. The house is the funniest performer in the film.

A gentle satire of post-war affluence and the tyranny of the labour-saving device, Mon oncle was a popular success and a critical landmark, and it led Tati on to the even more radical, and financially ruinous, PlayTime. It is warm where it could have been merely clever, and never cruel to the people caught up in its gleaming machines, and it remains one of the most pleasurable critiques of modern life ever filmed. Its sympathies lie with clutter, accident, leisure and human warmth.