“Jour de Fête” (1949)
One of the only Tati films to to not feature his famous alter ego Monsieur Hulot, still the inept, easily distracted French mailman of his debut feature wasn’t radically different, another elastic clown, perhaps just a proto test-run for what would be his sweet gangly-limbed second self. In Tati’s delightful first bow, the filmmaker stars as François, a promenading fussbudget mailman moving with a herky-jerk, to-and-fro gait similar to Hulot’s, comes to drop off his deliveries in a small, sleepy French village during Bastille Day. Essentially plotless (though perhaps less so than other minimalist pictures), François makes his deliveries in leisurely fashion, peddling around on his beloved bicycle. But this scatterbrained dreamer is constantly sidetracked from his duties and stops to help fly a flag up a pole, to have a drink, or to generally mess about. Featuring droll silent visual gags, the wide frame provides ample space to soak up all the movements in the background, while up front, Tati’s main thematic concerns also take shape: when Francois watches an American documentary about postal advances abroad, he is kicked into gear to try and improve his efficiency and speed, which will come into conflict with Tati’s affectionate, though occasionally cutting, look at rural life. Note: the film was shot and black and white and an early experimental form of color, but it was originally released in its stark colorless form. Tati’s daughter re-released it in color in 1995, and the Criterion edition features this version, plus an alternate cut Tati made in 1964. [B]
“Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday” (1953)
In 1996, upon anointing Jacques Tati’s “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday” as one of the “Great Movies,” Roger Ebert wrote that it is “the film for which [Tati] will be remembered.” Ebert’s intention wasn’t to diminish Tati’s other features, or even to suggest that ‘Holiday’ is necessarily the greatest of them all (it isn’t even close), but rather to say that this modest, severely bittersweet slapstick comedy is the film that best remembers Tati. ‘Holiday’ isn’t just the film that introduced Tati’s eponymous alter-ego, it’s also the one that best illustrates why the character has become one of the cinema’s most enduring icons. Shot in luminous black and white and nominated for Best Original Screenplay despite the fact that most of its dialogue is reduced to ambient noise (the murmuring adults in “Charlie Brown” feel like ex-pats from Tativille), ‘Holiday’ intricately orchestrates and wryly observes a stretch of time at a seaside resort along the French coast. The film doesn’t follow its bumbling, aloof, and unaccompanied hero so much as it occasionally finds him in the middle of it, striking his signature stance in the midst of a sight gag. That dynamic speaks to the deep-focus pleasure of Tati’s movies, which is that viewers are never told where to look. On the contrary, the various episodes that comprise ‘Holiday’ feel like they’d be happening regardless of the camera being there to capture them, Hulot’s presence is meant only to put these perfect moments into focus. Beginning with its most damning sequence—a series of wide shots that watches a manic hoard of vacationers as they try to find the right track for their train—‘Holiday’ is actually the most forgiving of Tati’s rebuttals to the madness of modern life. All of the Hulot films are funny, but ‘Holiday’ is the only one Tati made before his confusion had metastasized into irritation. Part fool and part witness, Hulot slips through the cracks of France’s hedonistic post-war bourgeosie, ribbing them for their commitment to invention over experience (it’s a good thing he didn’t live to see the iPhone age). Although much of ‘Holiday’ bleeds together, it also contains some of Hulot’s most ineffably simple gags, the best of which cementing how, in the films of Jacques Tati, everything is happenstance, but nothing happens by accident. [A]