Nov 23, 2010

Mon Oncle [1958]

Directed by Tacques Tati
Production Design by Henri Shmitt
Set Decoration by Henri Shmitt
Cinematography by Jean Burgoin
Film Format: 35 mm Aspect Ratio 1:37:1
Alter Films

In Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati pokes fun at the tragi-comedy of bourgeois habits of conspicuous consumption. To show both the clinical emptiness of mid-century, machine-inspired design dogma, and the vanity and fetishistic adherence of the aspiring middle class people who bought into it, Tati depicts the soullessness of the modern homemaker's environs. The kitchen performs a special role in the alienation of its users, with it's preference for novelty over familiarity, functionality over comfort, mechanistic exultation over intuitive joy. With all the comically boobytrapped devices and overwrought yet pristine furnishings, none of his criticism is as poignant as the forlorn expression of the title character's nephew, enduring the protracted execution of a boiled egg breakfast from the sterile apparatus tended by his rubber-gloved mother.










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