The English-language My Uncle is not just the same film with a different voice track: it is a curious attempt to create a visual and linguistic amalgam of America and France. All the shots where written language figures in the story – in the credit sequence, where the title Mon Oncle is scrawled on a wall, or outside the school, where we see ÉCOLE on the signboard, or in the factory parking lot, where SORTIE is painted on the ground – were reshot with English-language signs put in place; for many scenes with no translation requirement, different takes were used, and overall a great number of editing changes were made. As a result, the English My Uncle is about ten minutes shorter than the French, even though it includes some material never seen in France – for instance, the sinister, quasi-surgical disinfectant vaporizer device that Mme Arpel uses on Gérard’s toast and boiled egg.
 My Uncle (retitled My Uncle Mr Hulot for its later re-release in the US) is a more profoundly patronizing film than Mon Oncle. It seeks to create the bizarre fiction of a French environment in which the middle classes speak a stilted, outrageously regal British English, whilst the populace – including Georgette, the Arpels’ otherwise Spanish maid – babbles on in French. In that sense it reproduces a standard French nightmare with its roots at Omaha Beach, and behind that at Waterloo (if not at the Battle of Hastings, which produced the inverse result), of a country overrun by modernizing, economically powerful, English-speaking overlords. But that nightmare also enhances what Tati imagined to be an English- speaker’s perception of post-war France – a quaintly backward tourist paradise where you can perfectly well manage in English, except when you have to deal with the peasants. (…)

British English has the sound of snobbery in American as well as French ears, and in a comedy we should perhaps not seek too much linguistic verisimilitude. Nonetheless, the language- fantasy-land of My Uncle is, it seems to me, an entirely French creation. It uses English in exactly the way French culture feared English would be used, as the vehicle of distinction, superiority, and wealth. It marks a particular moment in French cultural anxie- ties, one that would be superseded by the far more convincing mongrelisation on tongues in the truly Anglo-French dialogues of Playtime.

David Bellos, Jacques Tati, The Harvill Press, 1999