Der doppelte Alfred

The Podalydès bros are one of the treasures of the contemporary French cinema whatever they film , Gaston Leroux or Becassine or ....you name it.... And besides they love Hergé and Tintin.

"Mon oncle" (1958) transposed to the hard realities of the twenty-first century ;Alexandre is a new Monsieur Hulot lost in the modern world ;both Podalydès 's film and Tati's come to the same conclusion ,some sixty years after.

Alexandre is lost in a dehumanized world , a computerized life where Big brother ,even if he does not appear ,is present everywhere ; a world full of English name -dropping , connected watches which never leave you alone ; when he eventually finds a job, he does not even know what they expect from him ; the language becomes computerese, a jargon Alexandre pretends to understand , it seems the work deals with drones .

His partner (in French ,they borrow the equivalent from maths :binôme -binomial- ,a hip word ) has a no-driver car ,with speech recognition ( the failed face recognition scene is worth the price of admission alone!) , which even sends her owner messages on her connected watch :"I 'm going to the next charging station "; in this state-of-the -art vehicle , Jean Ferrat 's magnificent song ,"la montagne", becomes a wonderful anachronism ......

But there's a fly in the oinment. If you want to work in this attractive firm, where the staff almost acts like robots ,there's a golden rule: you're not allowed to have children ! And Alexandre ,whose wife has joined the Navy , has to take care of his two toddlers.

Enter Arcimbaldo : he has plenty of jobs ,one of them consisting of replacing protesters in demonstrations : another sign of the time :Human beings are turned into robots indeed. Arcimboldo will play the role of the daddy .

A wonderful satire ,with plenty of gags,puns , and a revenge against a society that denies human relationships.