A Film Canon

This sublime parody of ergonomic futurism presents a world in which bodies have been tailored to fit objects, rather than vice versa, and thereby become objects themselves, fragmented and atomised into so many compositional ingredients, to be carefully slotted into a mise-en-scene that shines with plastic artificiality; that is, a world which has completely structured itself around an omniscient camera, with the result that this fragmentation remains irreversible, and collectivity doesn't consist in cohering the human body so much as redirecting its various limbs and organs towards other limbs and organs, rather than inanimate or mechanical objects, producing the gentle physical ambience - a buzz of subtle causes and effects - that remains Tati's most enduring aesthetic signature. As a result, a great deal of the humour stems from the disparity between functional and compositional imperatives, as the steel-and-glass efficiency of office, street and school are offset by the circuitousness that validates domestic architecture, as if the population had been streamlined merely to be forced through a series of ridiculous diversions and tributaries, all of which are explicated by Hulot's own wandering gait - most memorably when it bursts a water main, producing a fountain that, several feet over, would have been applauded as the height of taste and culture, but most chillingly in his brief employment at a plastics factory, where the sinister autonomy of this curve of capital manifests itself as a coil of hose that comes to life, and can only be subdued by the children and dogs - especially the eponymous nephew (Alain Becourt) - that act as his surrogates and students.