TORONTO PREMIERE OF RESTORED ENGLISH VERSION!

The English version of Mon Oncle, which Tati made concurrently with the better known French version (and reportedly preferred, having an aversion to subtitles), was beautifully restored by Fondation GAN and Les Films de Mon Oncle and presented as a gala in Bologna. Today, in a print imported from France especially for this screening, the rarest of opportunities to see this important restoration. Winner of both the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and the Jury Prize at Cannes, Mon Oncle was an enormous international success. (Ed Sullivan interviewed Tati and Brigitte Bardot in Paris.) Mon Oncle is a brilliant satire about the impersonality, tedium, mechanism, and sterility of modern life. Tati plays the “uncle” of the title, whose casual, shambling abode is contrasted with that of Monsieur Arpel, a plastics manufacturer. The latter is a white horror of geometric severity and hygienic perfection, with a pristine yard, an arsenal of gadgets, and a fountain less evocative of nature than industry. Bringing chaos into this cold, soulless place with its forbidding gate and garden, the unemployed Tati delights his nine-year-old nephew with his aptitude for accidents. Tati orchestrates some of his best gags – malfunctioning garage doors, a sexually charged party, a very long car trying to manoeuvre into a small parking space – to comment on the way modern life traps humanity within its contrivances. “Slapstick heaven” (Anthony Lane, The New Yorker).

Rated PG.