Here Jacques Tati tries to show by his gentle satire how de-humanised we are becoming (and this was half a century ago!). The passion with which people hurl themselves into 'the new', at the price of their souls, the glee with which the patina of the ages is scraped by the sandpaper of market forces from the surface of our lives, is here shown for the mindless vandalism it is. Tati shows how his sister in the story, devoted to him though she is, is a vandal of all that he holds dears about life. Her twee idolatry of mechanical gadgets, her worship of the fashionable, and her social enslavement to the opinions of others, render her a threat to the world. Tati tries to save his nephew from this moral corruption in his bumbling way. Gag after gag expose the hollowness of the mad world of affluence. Tati 'goes his way', breaking things, tripping over things, embarrassing everybody, making a mess. But it is the unplanned and truly precious mess of real life, of the natural way of living, that is the subject of Tati's Ode. Tati is a charmed fool, an innocent, because he cannot be contaminated. He is a kind of idiot savant, and the temptations of the banal cannot reach him. There are some wonderfully funny moments in this film, but its humour is more generally diffused throughout as a kind of pervasive glow. It is another Tati classic, to be savoured by those who do not have to rush off, but instead are prepared to share 'moments of being' at the pace of pre-modern existence with this man who would rather be thought stupid than be corrupted.
Review of My Uncle
