While he is not totally inept at modern life, his is nevertheless a poetic look at the details that inform such a world.

Hulot is the consummate outsider looking in. In addition, there is the scene of Hulot’s sister turning on a gaudy fish-fountain only when guests are coming in Mon Oncle (1958), and his smoking, backfiring old car in Les Vacances de M. For instance, in Playtime (1967) there is the difficulty of regulating the air conditioner/heater just right hilarity in the crown imprint that is left on the back of people’s shirts and the objects falling out from Hulot’s pocket’s when he hangs upside down from a tree in Traffic. But as the films progress we begin to see that Hulot is at the centre of these things, perhaps not necessarily physically, but through his ability to draw the viewer’s attention to them. At first, we see a quirky character that is witness to a multitude of simultaneously occurring phenomena. Yet he does not readily give away this impression when we are introduced to him. His glance is always glued to the mundane and seeming trivial nuances of everyday life. Hulot walks the city armed with the curiosity that only some tourists and poets can possess. Hulot is something of a magnifying glass that amplifies the importance of everyday objects through his insatiable curiosity. But this is what makes the universe of Monsieur Hulot (Tati) replete with meaning. Tati infuses his films with a brilliant array of broken objects, curious trinkets, and overly complicated hardware. Thus the comic nature of objects is viewed as such because there are human subjects from which they are differentiated and which they ultimately affect. But anonymity in Tati’s films can equally be interpreted to reflect the status and relative position of objects in the life of his characters. (1) Tati’s work is replete with images of the anonymity that seems so prevalent in modern technological life.

If it is true that God is in the details, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe asserts, then Jacques Tati’s films are architectonic temples.

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