Against the Tide towards Fadism & Sterile Environments

Tati has a real dig at postwar western society's obsession with the ultra-modern & with American-influenced consumerism. The bourgeois social climbers the Arpels live in an ugly, antiseptic modernist style home with a geometrically designed pristine garden. The home's arsenal of whiz-bang gadgets are all push button fully automated. Tati views this kind of 'progress' through technological innovations as enslavement to a sterile & coldly impersonal environment. Not only this, the functional effectiveness of the Arpels' modernist marvel is not up to scratch. The gate is practically entry-proof, the garage doors malfunction, the small parking space is totally inadequate for the Arpel's very long car, and so on. Hulot contributes to the disorder of the home but this simply serves to emphasise the folly & inanity of this whole uncritical trend.