Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

Hulot Goes There

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
aka Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot
France 1953
Directed by Jacques Tati
Studio Canal UK Blu Ray

For over five decades now, my dad has been moaning at me to watch both Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, the first direct sequel (or so I’m told). They absolutely cracked him up when he was a kid and for many years to come. Well, this year I finally bit the bullet by getting him, for his birthday, a Blu Ray box set of, apparently, all of Jacques Tati’s films and this one, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, aka Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, is the first one we were watching together. 

And I have to say, I’m almost grudgingly impressed by it. 

Not at first... although it starts off humorously enough, with a bunch of holiday goers waiting at the platform of a station. Then the tannoy spouting typically incomprehensible caterwaulings gets the fifty or so people to dash under the platform via stairs and arrive on the opposite platform, only for the tannoy to wail once again and for them to all dash back... and so on. 

We have all the holiday people arriving at the ‘typical’ coastal town of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer and checking into a hotel... and then director Tati, playing Mr. Hulot, turns up and things start going wrong for all and sundry. And although the film is packed full of humourous and, I have to say, extremely clever visual and audio gags (and I mean packed, there’s a heck of a lot going on in this movie) it took me a while to fall into step with it.

That is until the patient and persistent magic of the film slowly started to grow on me and I did find myself laughing at many points. And although Tati is absolutely brilliant with all his mannerisms and mishaps in this, my real window into this world was one of the other of the many... I guess in some ways eccentric... characters that populate the film. For instance, there’s the man who follows his wife around all movie but who never fails to see the full picture as he observes everything happening around him and seeing just what trouble Hulot is causing (and in some cases, not causing and is not really responsible for). 

But the character who did it for me the most is Martine, played by Nathalie Pascaud. She was a friend of Tati’s and had no other acting roles after other than a brief (I’m assuming a small part) turn in a movie ten years later. She didn’t actually pursue a career as an actress but, she should have, she’s absolutely fabulous in this. And, like the wandering guy mentioned in the paragraph above, she observes quite a lot of the shenanigans going on and takes a lot of joy from the chaos happening in Hulot’s wake, even befriending him towards the end of the film and dancing with him in the barely attended costume ball. I really wanted her to have a more romantic entanglement with the character but she’s delightful putting a kind of epilogue on the film, as she tries to suppress a laugh about her times at the sea side when somebody shows her a snapshot of Hulot. She was my window into the main character... to the point where I already want to watch the movie again, as I will now see it in a different light. Maybe I’ll watch the 1978 amended version (recut by and with new inserts by, Tati himself), which is also included on the disc.

And, of course, the film is all about random acts of comedy, nicely observed and captured by the director. A film full of collected moments, rather than a story, for sure. So I might mention the kid’s head popping up through the steering wheel of the bus, the time Tati dries himself off with a towel (not realising he’s standing against a post and the towel is going nowhere near him), the card game where a guy on a revolving chair gets turned around and back without realising, wrecking two games at once and leading to much verbal castigation... and a wonderful and surreally nonsensical sequence on a tennis court which has had me going over the dynamics of the ‘Hulot serve’ whenever I think on it... which seems to be a lot in the last couple of days. 

There are also little touches of visual poetry here and there too... such as, after the regular assembling of all the guests at the hotel for meals, shots of the deserted beach and the debris left by the holiday makers.

Looking at it now, I can see how there might be a through line in both French and international cinema from the popular figurehead of French comedy Tati, to his influence on directors like, I’m sure, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. And I would be not surprised in the least to find the strong influence of Tati’s Hulot in the genetic DNA of Peter Sellar’s version of Inspector Jacques Clouseau, who even shares a first name with the director, possibly in homage to him.

And that’s me done on Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, I think. Certain fan bases might want to note that, as far as I can tell, the English dub where the great Christopher Lee did all the voices, is not included in this Studio Canal presentation. But hey, the proper French version is great and if you want to see an inventive slice of classic comedy, this one is a good one to go with.