Drugstore.com Coupons
Here, Hulot is the uncle of pre-teenaged Gerard (Alain Becourt), who shares his unproductive and mildly anarchistic ways. Gerard lives his with parents, unduly proud housewife Adrienne Servantie and moderately self-righteous business executive Jean-Pierre Zola. Servantie is Hulot's sister, and doesn't mind that he lives there, but Zola is sick of his presence as well as his inability to hold a job.
How others will see it. Although obscure in America, Jacques Tati has a large European following. Within the filmmaker community, he is both influential and respected. Mon Oncle won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but those who usually abhor subtitles may still enjoy the movie. Most of the humor is subtle and visual, and involves crowd favorites such as undersized dogs and prank-prone schoolboys.
How I felt about it. The humor of Mon Oncle is very difficult for a director to achieve. The film is nearly bereft of plot. The closest thing to a storyline is Hulot's travails on the job, which consist of a few factory scenes. There are a few running gags, principal among which is Servantie's gauche fish statue and the intermittent stream of blue pond water that spouts from its mouth.
The success of Mon Oncle is not because of its story or script. Even the characters aren't of critical importance, although Monsieur Hulot is the obvious predecessor of mute walking disaster Mr. Bean (no wonder that Bean's second feature film was set in France, apparently the birthplace of this style of whimsical comedy).
Instead, the key to Mon Oncle is its flavor, or more precisely, its ability to take an ordinary setting and reveal the absurdity that lurks within it. A woman purchases grapefruit from a street vendor. Nothing unusual here, until we learn that a flat tire on the truck causes the scale to be in error, which aggravates a berating customer.
The preposterous fish fountain is humorous, but not because it does, or doesn't, spout a stream of water. Again, it is the cause that is amusing: Servantie's alternating vanity and practicality. She turns on the stream before admitting visitors to her little estate, and turns it off when there are no guests to impress. Later, during a small lawn party, the stream moves unexpectedly from the fish to a hose that runs beneath the lawn. The stream's new location is funny only because we know what caused it, a characteristic blunder by Hulot.