Mon Oncle (1958)

Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle arrives from 1958, when the phrase consumer society was still a fresh accusation, and takes as its target the Villa Arpel, a house built entirely of right angles and appliances. The fish-shaped fountain runs only for guests worth impressing. The kitchen deafens. The chairs are hostile to sitting. Tati's point, delivered through a soundtrack in which dialogue serves as ambient noise, is that geometry does not produce likeable people. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and has been admired ever since, which is a polite way of saying it has been absorbed into the canon and stripped of its capacity to annoy.

There is a complaint against consumption here, and it deserves a modest accounting. The Arpels subordinate their individuality to their possessions. M. Arpel's workplace at Plastac is a factory of automatons. Status is performed through furniture. But the objection is nostalgic and humanist, not political. Tati mourns a crumpled old Paris of cobblestones and idle afternoons. He proposes no alternative economy. French critics at the time called the film reactionary, even Poujadiste, which tells us the politics were legible enough to irritate the left and vague enough to comfort the right. That is the signature of a satire aimed at manners, not systems.

The rest of the ledger is bare. The cast is entirely French and European. The women are satirized as consumers alongside the men, which is a joke about materialism, not a brief for liberation. Nobody discusses race, ecology, bodies, or neurology. Hulot is dreamy and clumsy; that is a comic type, not a diagnosis. Above all, the film refuses to explain itself. Tati lectures no one. He films a doorbell and lets us draw conclusions. It is a nearly silent sermon against noise, and for that restraint it earns our quiet respect.