Jour De Fête

Post Haste

Jour De Fête
France 1948
Directed by Jacques Tati
Studio Canal UK Blu Ray

Okay, so Jour de fête is Jacques Tati’s first feature film, inspired from an earlier short film. And it’s a film which has him playing a much different character to the Monsieur Hulot character he created next. I mean, the similarities are, of course, a bumbling personality who gets caught in comic situations but, yeah, he’s not just an observer to the situations he finds himself in here, he kind of brings a lot more of this on himself. 

Now, had I known that the film had been shot in an experimental colour format, which was unable to be processed properly at the time, I would have watched the1995 colour version which is also, along with a third version, on the Blu Ray in the Jacques Tati boxed set. However, I’d just assumed that was a colourised version, as opposed to what it is, which is a successful attempt at finally being able to process the colour negative, which Tati had thrown out but which his daughter retained. 

This one, like both the other Tati film’s I’ve seen so far... Monsier Hulot’s Holiday (reviewed here) and Mon Oncle (reviewed here) takes an awful long time for Tati’s character to enter the film. Preferring, instead, to quitely observe the comedic and eccentric antics of the village in which Tati plays the postman... riding through on his bike and getting caught up in things other than delivering the letters and packages on his route. But it’s his way of doing things and it works well.

The primary ingredient for these scenes and a lot of the movie is an observer character to witness some of the chaos and give the audience an anchor point to see things from. In this movie it takes the form of an old woman, walking around the village, dragging her goat who she talks to (as much to herself) and this device is used to fill the audience on the background story of what is going on as she continues her perambulations.

What is going on is it’s carnival day in the village and we watch the stalls and the carousel arrive in lorries to be assembled, as well as the erection of the mayor’s new pole (something which Tati’s postman inevitably gets caught up in, trying to raise it). The thing about the Tati character here is... things don’t just happen to him but they are engineered by others to also happen to him. He perhaps doesn’t realise it but most of the village seems to disrespect him enough to egg him on to uncontrollable situations and generally just take the mickey out of him. 

This includes showing him a film in the cinema marquee, which is a documentary about the American post. After a drunken slumber (the villagers deliberately get him drunk and set him free again), he awakes the next morning determined to put into practice the spirit of the speedy US mailmen and incorporate it into his work. And, as usual it’s filled with clever moments...

Such as, after his new found mission to speed up his service, he hitches his bike to a lorry heading for the centre of the village and uses the drop down back as his desk while he rubber stamps all his letters, making his way to his destination at high speed. And the film is full of the wonderful scenes of inventive and often very comic turns which this director seems to be noted for. And, as I watched his postman ride his bike around, I remembered the Wallace & Gromit films of Nick Park and thought to myself, oh yeah, of course, there’s another director who you can see Tati has been a major influence on. 

Now, it has to be said, the film didn’t do a lot for me... or at least not as much as the wonderful Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday... but I really didn’t mind it either and, I think, if the character had been more in keeping with the spirit of his later Hulot character, I would have probably responded a lot more to it. As it is, the film must have been a huge success because the studio apparently asked him to do a sequel. Instead, he pushed ahead with Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and the rest, as they say, is history.

So that’s me done with Jour De Fête and I’m looking forward to delving further into the rest of this box at some point soon... and getting back to Monsieur Hulot, of course.