“Trafic” (1971)
“Playtime” may be one of the greatest films ever made, but its financial failure left Tati’s career running on fumes, and its scale left him with no choice but to downshift to something decidedly smaller. The fourth and final of the Hulot films, “Trafic” casts the aging (but still lovably oblivious) Frenchman as an automobile designer tasked with transporting his company’s latest car to an auto show in Amsterdam. A simple jaunt from point A to point B that’s inevitably complicated by an array of amusing detours, “Trafic” is almost impossible to extricate from its place in the twilight of Tati’s career—it’s a defeated work of compromise (Tati was done with the Hulot character by this point). But the film nevertheless provides some of Hulot’s finest moments, and ultimately gives the iconic character the wistful send off he deserves. Although Hulot plays a more central role in “Trafic” than he does in “Playtime,” this is the film in which it’s easiest to lose track of him, or even forget his presence altogether. Hulot is little more than a glorified extra for the first 15 minutes, and when he finally does step into the spotlight as a plot begins to take shape, it seems as though he’s been stripped of the impeccable cosmic kismet that previously always found him at the center of the joke (or close to it). Tati’s gag-to-minute ratio was never lower than it is here, ‘Trafic’ powered more by bemusement than readily identifiable humor—it doesn’t help that the film is a bit too enamored with the crazy car that Hulot and his team are delivering to the auto show, devoting long stretches of time to the swiss army knife of a vehicle and all of the tiny versions of campground equipment that can be folded out from it. The laughs are few and far between, but the premise offers all sorts of opportunities for Tati to roll his eyes at how cars conflate public and private spaces (perhaps providing an unlikely source of inspiration for Abbas Kiarostami). “Trafic” is at its most fun when inside things are confused for outside things and vice-versa—the cars seen on show floors, where they’re surrounded by a forest of fake trees. And while Tati seems to have lost a lot of his directorial control (an impression amplified by the vehicular mayhem of European highways), his idiosyncratic genius is ultimately irrepressible, and the all-timer of a last shot is enough to make you grateful that he didn’t give up. [B+]
“Parade” (1974)
Vaudeville, music halls, mime, and acrobatic theatrical performance were always the central key to Tati’s work so perhaps it was logical for the filmmaker to explore and celebrate these modes in “Parade,” which ended up being his final feature-length effort, though hardly something that could be described as a feature-length narrative. Closer in spirit to concert documentary, “Parade” is pastiche that is deceptively simple. and essentially a live doc snapshot of a circus performance lead by Tati as both ringmaster and performer. Shot on 35MM, 16MM, and dated 1970s-quality video, “Parade” has been seen as a monotonous minor work by the filmmaker. There’s even less plot and fewer focal characters than in his other minimal narratives. But the experimental “Parade” provides a valuable clue as to the direction Tati might have headed had he lived on to make more movies. The filmmaker had spoken about his desire to achieve a more “democratic” film as evinced by Hulot’s minor presence in “Playtime” where the swarm of culture and society is the star. And he achieves this in “Parade” by shattering the glass between performer and audience. Indeed, Tati’s film has an interactive and inclusive quality that focuses just as much on audience reaction as it does performance. So we get jugglers, magicians, acrobats, and more, but it also gives time for the intermission, the craftsman behind the stage, the amateur audience performers and the participation of the crowd in various stunts. All the while, Tati weaves in orchestrated shot-on-film segments of various gags and behind-the-scenes jokes. While the presentation of the film does feel a little bric-a-brac compared to all the other carefully composed Tati movies—shot by Bergman cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, the TV segments even have Tati no-nos like close-ups and zooms making it a formal outlier—ultimately “Parade” is still an affectionately undiluted homage to all that he loved. Perhaps it also can be seen as the director’s idealized notion of a utopian circus in which everyone can participate. A nostalgic look at the dying arts, as the picture comes to an end, the audience slowly shuffles out and left behind are two children playing in the wake of this grand mess of paint, props, confetti, and other tchotchkes. It’s an oddly hopeful note on which to turn off the lights, as if to say that the wonder and curiosity of the young will always keep the imaginative arts alive. [B]