i love jacques tati.nt—maur — a little town just outside paris, in the banlieues of paris. and it's here in this very square thatjacques tati filmed part of mon oncle in 1957. what he does with the settings is draw a very clear contrast between here — and this is where monsieur hulot, the hero, lives, just right here — and then, just down the road — modern, the new, what's coming in. and in the film, what's lovely is that there's this kind of borderline — and, really, he's obviously constructed it like a border, a frontier between the old and the new. and the frontier is this kind of broken—down old wall with an old gate and bricks all around it. on this side is here — lovely, old, popular, working class france, paris. and on the other side is what's coming — and you see the new blocks of flats, white in rectangles, and the big, clean lines of the roads emerging on the other side of this frontier. it's a great feeling to think that jacques tati would have been wandering around here. of course, it would've