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The title is a chalky scrawl on a neighborhood wall, the credits are signposts at a construction site. Jacques Tati's Paris, half postcard and half operating room. (Godard takes up the clinical side for his own suburbanites in Une Femme Mariée.) Monsieur Hulot, quite content in the old quarter, in and out of bustling bistros and up and down the great dollhouse. His opposite number is the factory executive (Jean-Pierre Zola) married to his fussbucket sister (Adrienne Servantie), whose home is a wonder of mechanized sterility. Severely manicured garden with winding gravel paths and gurgling aluminum fish-shaped fountain, blanched kitchen with rubbery pitchers and buzzing buttons, the chairs on the porch face indoors for watching "Professor Patov's TV hour." On the margins of the geometric gadgetry is the ten-year-old boy (Alain Bécourt), quietly hiccuping. "Everything is connected," that goes for the squeaky window and the caged parakeet and the produce scale and the flat tire, Tati's funny bone is analytical like that. Modern furniture, you sink into it, modern architecture, it watches you at night. The office job is never meant to be, the dirty shoe on the interviewer's desk betrays a voyeur: "We are not looking for acrobats at the moment." Lily pads are not stepping stones, red hoses on the other hand can turn into serpents or sausages. (A different Ovidian transformation envisions restless schoolboys as scampering strays, the melancholy nephew is certainly the little dachshund in the flannel coat.) Continuous Muzak, industrial hums and hisses, the clip-clop of a secretary's heels, raucous laughter from whispered jokes. Plastic flowers ("They never wilt"), a miniature foretaste of Antonioni's La Notte. Blink and the concierge's daughter (Betty Schneider) is all grown up, Hulot's off to the airport, "dommage." The curtain call is a sheer veil gently flapping over a framed view. Cinematography by Jean Bourgoin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |