“Comedy is the summit of logic,” French filmmaker Jacques Tati once remarked. It’s not the most typical (or warm) statement about the construction of comedy, but it epitomizes, in his own eccentric way, the director’s singular method: a subtly peculiar, but charming, style of nuanced absurdist gags choreographed with meticulous, almost architectural precision.
An amalgam borne of the tradition of silent film comics like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel & Hardy, vaudeville, variety shows, pantomime, and parlor tricks, Tati synthesized these influences to create the world of Tativille; a deadpan, wry milieu of physical comedy with an emphasis on image and sound. Through his absentminded and awkward Monsieur Hulot alter ego, the leisure-inclined Tati would gently poke a satirical finger at the encroaching modern world, with its dehumanizing, de-personalizing ideals of progress, consumerism, materialism, and more.
But if his slapstick and pratfalling was laugh-out-loud funny, Tati’s brand of comedy was much more than that, at times almost subterranean, a minute and observational form of visual humor built around elaborate physical gags. In fact Tati rarely elicits belly laughs because his satire is simultaneously both high and low. A nose-picking gag in “Trafic” also manages to comment existentially on societal ennui. You were perhaps too wowed with admiration to supply more than an impressed guffaw.
“Our world becomes each day more anonymous…the world is in the process of becoming an enormous clinic.” – Jacques Tati
What further separated Tati from most comedic auteurs before and after (minus a few exceptions) was his rigorous formalism, an aesthetic of precise symmetry and a kaleidoscopic musique concrète approach to sound (not enough is said about his influence on that other rare, comedic, fussy formalist, Wes Anderson). Through this rigor, Tati managed to marry his endearingly scatterbrained Hulot character to an increasingly alienating world, an impulse that would hit its symphonic peak with the experimental and innovative “Playtime.” His 1974 70MM-lensed masterpiece is to visual comedy what Kubrick’s ‘2001” is to interstellar space travel.
There had of course been silent comics before him, but perhaps none possessed the same mastery of spatial dimension and mise en scene (though Chaplin-ites may argue). Tati however, was the logical extension of great silent comedy into the world of sound. Indeed dialogue is at the bottom of his list of concerns (like his rejection of traditional plot), but still Tati’s films are only superficially silent. Like a mime, Hulot spoke volumes with his spindly-limbed gestures and murmuring tics, and his use of the buzz of everyday life for context and counterpoint provides its own dizzy cacophony. Add to that the whimsically Gallic, jaunty scores and you get a sonic collage that is unmistakably Tati’s own.
Tati only made five feature-length features in his career, six if you consider the little seen TV movie “Parade” (which you should), but it’s a testament to his singular vision that he is ranked among the greatest auteurs with only a handful of pictures to his credit. Indeed, “Playtime” would probably afford him a space among the greats for its immense achievements alone. So rather than feeling the paucity of this back catalogue, we can marvel at how clearly and immediately Tati expressed his cinematic raison d’etre. He had already mastered his own voice within the span of three films.
While perhaps not as well regarded as some of cinema’s most hallowed artists, he had no shortage of admirers. Jean-Luc Godard professed his admiration for his “strangeness,” David Lynch is an avowed disciple and listed him among his all-time favorite filmmakers, and Jacques Rivette likened the apex of the balletic “Playtime” to that of a cinematic revolution.
Contradiction is crucial to Tati’s work, so ultimately reading him as solely as a nostalgic rallying against progress is too facile. “When people don’t know each other they follow right angles. When they are intimate they go in curves,” Tati once said even though his carefully composed films rarely display an arc and his angular doppelganger did little other than walk gawkishly at a 45 degree angle (admittedly sometimes in circles). This was a filmmaker who used forms of the utmost, clinical rigor to express his lament for society’s increasingly constricting anonymity, its antiseptic qualities. Tati’s alien figure Hulot—the innocent caught out of time—was not existentially estranged from the world despite his wobbly, teetering, tentative steps. In fact, Hulot is co-opted by it all and by the end of Tati’s career, he is part of the system, working for modern manufacturers as an automobile designer in “Trafic.” At best, Tati perhaps should be remembered as a retro futurist, way ahead of his time, dealing in the unfathomables of the present and the uncertainties of the future. But there’s a curiosity there too, because as Tati historian Kristin Ross says, Hulot, as apprehensive and faltering as his false-starts always were, was ultimately always leaning forward into what lay ahead. After all, two steps forward, one step back will get you there in the end.
The Criterion Collection has released The Complete Jacques Tati, an essential compendium and box set of everything the filmmaker ever made. It feels like as good as any excuse to celebrate this master.