Comedy world of Tati honored

Paris — ewly restored copies of Jacques Tati’s 1958 masterpiece “My Uncle” (“Mon Oncle”), including an original English version missing for decades, premiered in Paris Wednesday as part of the run-up to a centennial celebration of France’s great comic film genius.

Inspired by the silent-era gags of Buster Keaton and the wry humor of W.C. Fields, both giants of American comedy, Mr. Tati forged a comic universe all his own in the 1940s and 1950s.

At its center is Mr. Tati’s alter ego and anti-modern hero, the unflappable, unfailingly polite Monsieur Hulot.

Armed with his signature pipe and trench coat, the gracefully bumbling Hulot embodies for Mr. Tati a noble but losing struggle against the dehumanizing forces of modern management and unbridled consumerism.

In “My Uncle,” the second in a quartet of Hulot films spanning two decades, these corrupting trends are embodied in our hero’s brother-in-law and sister, he a preening executive in a rubber-hose factory, she a fastidious housewife reigning over an austere and ultra-automated modern house ripped straight from the pages of a trendy architecture magazine.

The unemployed Hulot lives in a makeshift rooftop apartment in a run-down part of town full of scruffy dogs and even scruffier children, a real French neighborhood where lifelong neighbors bargain and bicker in the market and greet every passer-by.

This is Mr. Tati’s paradise, an endangered natural habitat soon to be steam-rollered by the American-inspired forces of progress with a capital P.

His Hulot feels out of place in this sterile brave new world, expressing not so much contempt as bewilderment at its misplaced values.

“You don’t seem to be able to adjust,” his brother-in-law says with a mix of exasperation and pity when Hulot gets himself fired after one day at the rubber-hose factory.

Mr. Tati’s films are short on plot and even shorter on dialogue, driven instead by painstaking composition of image, an original use of sound and visual comedies of error that never fail to surprise.

“My Uncle” does have a dramatic core, though: the struggle for the soul of Hulot’s young nephew Gerard, who is chided by his humorless parents for exactly the qualities Hulot encourages by his very being — playfulness, humility and joie de vivre.

The English version — thought to be lost until a tattered copy was found by accident and restored — is more than a curiosity, and Mr. Tati spent a year in post-production making it.

Much of what is lampooned in “My Uncle” came from the late 1950s America of big, shiny cars and full-throated consumerism, and Mr. Tati clearly intended to confront the Anglo-Saxon world with his judgment on it excesses.

The film was both a critical and a commercial success, garnering the special jury prize at the Cannes film festival in 1958 and a best-foreign-film Oscar the following year.

The rights to the entire Tati oeuvre were purchased not long ago by relatives and friends of the filmmaker, who died penniless in 1982 after his later films, though critically acclaimed, flopped at the box office.

Their association (www.tati ville.com) is refurbishing his work reel by reel, partly in preparation for the 2007 centennial of his birth, when Mr. Tati’s beloved work will be celebrated in various events around the world.