Trafic

1971 Director Jacques Tati

This was Jacques Tati’s last foray in to the chaotic world of his hapless alter ego Hulot and also his penultimate film.

The bumbling Monsieur Hulot, outfitted as always with tan raincoat, beaten brown hat, and umbrella, takes to Paris’ highways and byways. For this, his final outing, Hulot is employed as a car company’s head designer, and accompanies his camper, fitted out with absurd gadgetry, to a trade show in Amsterdam. Naturally, the road is paved with modern-age mishaps.

After the financial disaster of Playtime, Tati embarked on this project undeterred, returning to his finer observational filming. This late-career delight is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’ expert timing and side splitting visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.

Mon Oncle

1958 Director Jacques Tati

This is Tati's second Hulot film contrasting the emerging ultra-modern wave of the late 50's with the more sedate and shambolic life he is used to.

This time, the story finds Hulot on a constant collision with the physical world. Visiting his sister and brother-in-law in their ultra-progressive household full of noisy gadgets and futuristic decor, Hulot inevitably has dust-ups with modernity, each one exceptionally funny. Taking a page from Buster Keaton’s playbook, Tati also employs his trademark techniques with sound and production design to achieve the indefinable, comic genius of his films: the rhythmic clacking of footsteps, the cartoon-panel distance of his camera frame from the heart of the action.

This is a wonderfully gentle satire on modern development that Tati was to take to a darker stage in his next film Playtime. This is marked a departure from his previous more gentle looks at rural attitudes. Tati is one of the cinema’s great treasures, and this movie is unforgettable.

Play Time

1967 Director Jacques Tati

Tati directed this film nearly a decade after Mon Oncle. Playtime continues the adventures of M. Hulot in a starker and more indifferent social setting.

The colourful Paris of Mon Oncle, last seen being slowly chipped away by progress, has now vanished almost entirely. Playtime takes as its setting an ultra-modern Paris where familiar landmarks appear only as fleeting reflections in the new buildings of glass and steel. Alternating between Hulot and a group of American tourists, Tati exploits the chaos just below the overly ordered surface of this brave new world. Again moving from one nearly wordless episode to another, Tati sends his alter ego off to make an appointment in a whirring, featureless office complex. He subsequently moves on to an exhibition of new inventions, meets an old friend at an aquarium-like apartment, and wreaks havoc in a snooty new restaurant.

Although ambitious and technically complex this is not the most polished of the Hulot films. It proved unpopular and unprofitable and helped usher in the financial difficulties that would plague Tati late in life before finally getting the recognition it enjoys today. Tati was generally dissatisfied with this film as can be seen in the small extras where he casts the script into the collapsing rubble of the set as it is demolished.

Les Vacances de M. Hulot

1953 Director Jacques Tati

The first appearance of Hulot and a masterpiece of gentle slapstick.

Pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot takes a holiday at a seaside resort where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another.  Tati's wildly funny satire of vacationers determined to enjoy themselves includes a series of precisely choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers. 

This is a masterpiece of comic timing and running gags that made Tati famous. It's a delight to watch and captures a gentle, less rushed time, now long forgotten. Many of the participants were local people employed on the spur of the moment. The Hotel still exists unaltered in Saint Marc sur Mer, where this was filmed. In fact, the town erected a statue of Monsieur Hulot on the promenade overlooking the beach where most of the action was filmed. A very fitting tribute to a true cinematic gem.

Jour De Fête

1949 Director Jacques Tati

This is Jacques Tati's pre-Hulot first feature. Intriguingly, Tati originally shot this film in two simultaneous processes; a black and white one and an experimental color one called 'Thomson-Color' but was forced to release the black-and-white version when he ran into problems printing the color film. Then in the late 1990s his daughter prepared and released a color version of the entire movie.

Tati plays a contented postman in a small, unhurried French village. He leisurely performs his duties, peddling away on his rounds on his bicycle. A traveling fair arrives in town. One of the attractions at the carnival is a film depicting the United States Postal Service's fast and efficient postal delivery system. Tati accepts the challenge and attempts to modernise his work style with predictably disastrous results.

What this film captures beautifully is a post war rural community where the pace of life barely exceeds a crawl. The viewer is treated to a leisurely stroll through an unhurried era. It's a delightful film whose influence is evident in quite a few more modern films.