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. 

Mon Oncle

The Man From Oncle

Mon Oncle
France/Italy 1958
Directed by Jacques Tati
Studio Canal UK Blu Ray

Mon Oncle is the second of Jacques Tati’s films where he plays his beloved character Monsieur Hulot (uncredited, for some reason). It was made five years after Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (reviewed here) and he won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards for his trouble. 

This time around we see Hulot living in an apartment of a maze like, multistory house (which was actually two houses put together) and, said house and his elabourate route to his apartment at the top is definitely something I’ve seen done before... or rather, after. Like I said in my review of the previous movie, these films were much loved and cast a very long shadow of influence on the film industry (globally, not just in France). I’m sure, for example, there’s a very similar sequence rendered in homage in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (reviewed here). 

Most of the action, though, is split between the local environment... as Hulot collects his sister’s son from school and also takes walks around the neighbourhood with him... and at his brother-in-law’s high tech home, built by his company. The sister is played by Adrienne Servantie, her husband is played by Jean-Pierre Zola and their ‘always up to mischief’ son is played by Alain Bécourt. There’s also some action at the brother-in-law’s factory as he tries to employ Hulot to help him out. 

Like the first movie, there’s not too much dialogue and it’s a slow comedy of observations as Hulot and the local populace find themselves in various comical situations and eccentricities. There’s the road sweeper who talks so much to all and sundry that he never manages to move his pile of rubbish, for example. Or the wonderful moment when a dog is snarling at the toothy fish that Hulot has in his bag.

About those dogs... the movie begins and ends with a bunch of dogs, rummaging through the bins of the neighbourhood in the morning and, this is where the film also ends. And these dogs are prominent anchor points throughout the film, one of which is the dog owned by Hulot’s brother-in-law, 

Now, I have to say that, this one is another slow burn of a movie and, unlike Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, I didn’t quite warm to this one in the same way and so I prefer the first one. I have to say though that, like the first one, the film is extremely clever and has a lot of great visual gags. Such as the way Hulot has to angle the open window of his flat in just the right way every morning so that the reflection from the sun hits the canary in the building opposite to get it to sing. Or, when he’s trying to fix a problem caused by the kid (involving some decorative plant life) and he’s in the grounds of the high tech home at night, the two round windows at the top of the house become eyes that follow him around with the pupils made up of the husband and wife peering out into the night. 

Also, unlike Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, this film is shot in colour and there are some really nice colour combinations captured for the film, not least of which is the combination of hues found in the high tech home itself. The mise en scène is absolutely stunning in this and even if some of the comedy antics of the various characters don’t quite wash with you, the film at the very least looks great so, yeah, something for everyone, perhaps. 

In a way, this film reminded me a little of the Peter Sellars vehicle The Party (which my friend Kerry used to love so much) and, as I said in my previous review, the influence of Tati on Sellars, especially his work on the Inspector Clouseau films, seems pretty obvious (and I’m sure Rowan Atkinson and his Mr. Bean creation must also have been heavily influenced by Tati too). 

Okay, I think that’s me just about done with Mon Oncle. Unlike the first Hulot film (which I really have to watch again soon), this one felt a little flatter to me but I could still marvel at some of the clever, visual jokes and I can certainly see why this film captured the imagination in the way it did. I shall certainly be continuing with these films, for sure. 

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.