Playtime (1967)

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) If I were asked to describe Jacques Tati's masterwork (and the one that broke him...or made him broke), I couldn't tell you. Episodic and eccentric, it covers 24 hours in a section of Paris near Orly Airport where everything goes like clockwork—at least that is the intention. That's a good 10 second summary; the details take up the whole two hours of the film. And more, actually, because Tati is not working at a standard joke a minute. He is overlapping strings of comedic incidents that will have their comedic pay-offs at different times during the six geographic sections that make up the film. 

Now, I could tell you what the film is about, but that would take the fun out of it. And fun is what Tati, the filmmaker, is all about, despite the fact that it looks at the world and its absurdities with a somewhat jaundiced eye, and that he sets up his movie with such intricacy (especially this one) that the making of it seems like a lot of hard work...for a comedy.

Three bus-loads of tourists—the American one contains Barbara (Barbara Dennek) the main recurring character of the film—come to the airport and begin a tour of Paris, but instead of the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, the tourists are taken out of the heavily regimented airport, and taken to a heavily regimented office building, where they can arrange for transport or hotel changes...if they can find where such conveniences are. Like the airport, you have to know where you're going, and despite an abundance of signage, one can't know where one is going...unless one has already been there to know the way.

Mr. Hulot (Tati) has the same problem: he has a meeting with an associate (probably an Army buddy, he meets several acquaintances from his past) at the very same office building—not that you could tell any of them apart. All steel with floor-to ceiling walls, one would think that the rule of glass houses would apply and one could see everything, but the building is set up to resemble a maze of cubicles and partitions so one could easily get lost while not being found. It becomes clear that Tati's definition of "ultra-modern" is that it's too modern to work, no matter how uniform and regimented the architecture is—Hulot never does have his meeting.

He does, however, get considerable mileage—not only in terms of foot-wear but also in comedy. The absurdities of cubicle working are well-documented, with proximity not being the guarantor of efficiency—the cubicles are just more road-blocks to getting things done, and obstacles to one-on-one communication and transactioning. It's no wonder Hulot gets so lost; the people working there are lost, as well.

The confusion is complicated by the layout of the office building that is given over to sales kiosks where new "modern" products are offered for sale and demonstration, presumably to improve lives, but look to be merely pretentious, whether it's garbage cans that look like Greek columns, or sonically-enhanced doors that promise "Slam Your Doors With Golden Silence." The products scream innovation, but are merely silly in trying to make issues of things unimportant in the extreme.

The tourists and Parisiennes wander through the displays as things go right and go wrong, with mixed signals, mistaken identities, and the natural comedy of the self-important mixing with the clueless.

The fourth section of the film gets out of the business district and into nearby modular apartment buildings that are alarmingly transparent, as they have floor to ceiling windows overlooking the street. It's a voyeur's dream with all the privacy of putting renters into a zoo. Tati makes a great deal of the pantomime inherent in the juxtaposition of neighboring apartment owners and their activities.

This segues seamlessly into the fifth and longest section of the film featuring the opening of a new restaurant, The Royal Garden—that, even as the first guests are arriving, is still in its final stages of work applying the finishing touches. It's an impressive looking restaurant, if a bit on the tight side between tables, and there are design flaws...like the bar decorations that prevents the bartender from seeing the top shelf liquors or retrieving them without getting beaned. The chairs are designed with an impressive crown design on the backrest that creates little patterns on the backs of the female diners in backless dresses. There are electrical issues—like the neon sign in the front that leads folks to the door...or should, anyway.

The segment is a wonderful example of the "incredible mess" conceit where things than can go wrong, will in an increasingly cascading fashion. Before too long it becomes apparent where Tati's heart lies—the ones who enjoy their night out the most are the ones who can ignore the chaos and make the most of it, those folks who can bend with the hurricane winds and have a good time while things are going wrong and the best laid plans of men and architects fall flat.

It's a wonderfully odd film with a lot of detail (and Tati shot it in 70 MM to show it off) and the overriding view of the world that scoffs at organization and regimentation and celebrates the individual's effort to enter the "Exit" door.

Barbara can only find "the real Paris" when it is reflected in doorways.

Most comedy can be classified as the contrast and juxtaposition of two disparate philosophies, the surprising, unexpected ways that oil and water can mix; you can either be sane in an insane world, or insane in a sane, complacent one. In those instances, however, there is usually active resistance contrary to the status quo. 

Tati changes the game by not being resistant, but observant, and by that observation of the absurdity of its world and the ability of its denizens to navigate it...or not.

No matter how regulated in stance, or monochromatic in color the world may be, the most celebratory signs of life are the ones that step out of line and bring color to a world made dull by misguided efforts to bring it under control.

Now, that's comedy...as God laughs all the time.

Trafic

Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971) When the late Carl Sagan was touring the country, mostly around college campuses, expounding on an upcoming unmanned Mars mission, he would do a little slide presentation about the limitations of exploring other planets by merely photographic means, using Earth as a test subject to demonstrate that merely pretty pictures would not give the full story and might actually be deceiving about conditions on said spheroid. The upshot of the thing was that any being looking at Earth from above would get the distinct impression that automobiles were the dominant species on the planet and humans merely their parasites.

Cute idea, but the point was made.

That thought bubbles up as you watch Trafic, the final film featuring writer-director Jacques Tati as the character M. Hulot—made a few years after his gargantuan masterpiece, Playtime. In Trafic, Hulot is a designer for a car company called Altra, which is in its final preparations to display their latest product, an elaborate camping car, at an auto show in Brussels. A display backdrop is being prepared and transportation for the prototype finalized for the event, with a lot riding on the intricate design to be displayed. In such a frenetic atmosphere everything that can go wrong does go wrong, despite the amount of planning and foresight applied to every detail.

For one thing, the pieces of the display must be loaded and the hatchback itself carefully hauled into the truck to make its way to Brussels. All well and good, but the long drive will have many speed-bumps along the way, like border-crossings, proper paperwork, traffic jams, and potential breakdowns en route. These can be as simple as a bad tire, running out of gas, or merely having an incompetent driver (Marcel Fravel). Hulot rides along in the truck observing as things fall apart and attempting to help as best he can.

Zipping along with them is the company's public relations person (Maria Kimberly), who presents a together facade, but is something of a mercurial harpy, who seems more concerned with her image than the company's. She, at times, seems the complete opposite of a public relations person.

Meanwhile the gargantuan auto-show goes on with Altra's big-wigs all set to present with nothing to show for it, a situation that isn't made any better through the many phone-calls updating them on the progress—or lack of it—in getting the prototype to market.

The car is a little miracle of design—as intricate as a James Bond vehicle, if he had a license to camp. There are so many hidden features that one needn't go to a sporting goods store for anything extra—just get in the car and go. It comes complete with pull-out tent, a built-in grill, as well as camping chairs and beds. It's such an amazing vehicle that one knows that, like a Tucker, it wouldn't sell, anyway...that is, if the thing could get to market.

Like so much of Tati's work, it is episodic with a major story-line to prop the thing up. And it might as well be a silent film as 90% of the gags are visual—10% being for the sound effects Tati inserts in post-production.

It is not his best work, but it is entertaining, and leaves one with the melancholy certainty that cars might, indeed, be the prominent inhabitant of the world, and that the parasites dealing with them show no signs of intelligent life.

 

The Illusionist (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release...



"The Disappearing Act"
or
"We Liked His Earlier, Funny Ones..."

The French comic/film-maker Jacques Tati left one un-produced screenplay when he died in 1982. That script, entitled "Film Tati Nº 4," is the basis for animator Sylvain Chomet's first feature after The Triplettes of Belleville, The Illusionist (or L'Illusionniste). It is a lettre d'amour to Tati, with a main character resembling the French Master in size, style and manner (right down to the examination of the world with hands placed on the back of one's hips), directed in the same spare long-shot frame that allows disaster to occur from corner to corner.  It has the same errant mechanics (the sense that what could go wrong will go wrong), the ironic timing and "marking time" quality of Tati's films, in the elegantly focused manner of silent films with sound effects.

But, it is a special case. Tati wrote this after Mon Oncle and never made it, for whatever reason, coming down to mostly personal grief...but over whom is much in dispute. Tati had two daughters, a child-out-of wedlock whom he abandoned, named Helga, and his legitimate daughter Sophie. Tati was going to make the film with Sophie in the 1960's, but never did. His estrangement from his daughters weighed heavily on him, and the result—this melancholy little mea culpa—might have seemed as cheer-dousing as Charlie Chaplin playing MacBeth. Or, it was simply too "close" to commit to.

A not-too-well-considered prestidigitater, Tatischeff (Tati's real name, by the way) is pulling a living out of his hat on a low-rent club circuit. It is 1956, and rock n' roll is filling the theaters, and television is emptying the minds.  Tatischeff can't compete with his props and particularly ill-mannered rabbit (he bites!) and he plays empty halls to little applause. An invitation to perform at a private party in Scotland turns out relatively well, and he stays, making the acquaintance of Alice, who works the tavern and sees Tatischeff as a genuine magician. Noting the condition of her shoes, he buys her a nice pair of red ones, leaving her convinced her that actual magic can happen.

On a trip to Edinburgh,* he discovers that Alice has followed him without a ticket.  He buys her one, and the two travel the rest of the way together and settle in the city in a flop-house for performers. While Tatischeff performs to the dwindling crowds at the Music Hall, Alice cooks, cleans, becomes the roving ambassador to the other performers and wanders the streets looking at the promises of a better life in Edinburgh shop-windows. 

The relationship between performer and waif is completely a father-daughter relationship. He is a bit aloof, but tries to provide for her dreams by taking on a series of increasingly demeaning jobs, which he manages to pull off with uneasy aplomb. She cares for him, but looks to the horizon. At some point, his job is to let her go...to perform his own disappearing act in her life, if she is to have one. Bittersweet, to be sure.

The Illusionist also has up its sleeve the constant thread that everything is an illusion: performers and artisans put their best face forward, we hide behind masks, we project elegance, we learn as we go becoming expert only after trial and error, and there is nothing so false as the entertainment industry with its sad clowns, facile crooners and feathered chorines. There are no inner lives on stage, only the projection of illusion, a made-up false-front for reality.

Rich in detail and sub-text, it's the sort of quietly deep-thinking comedy that has mostly been absent since Tati passed, and though it has its laugh-out-loud moments, it is mostly a meditation on the transitory nature of life, how we dress it up, corral the chaos, change it, make it into reality only to see it fade and move on. It is partially performance, partially illusion, but we are constantly changing, turning something into something else. Life is what we make it and what it makes us.  

* I've been to Edinburgh—it's where Chomet's studio, Django films was located—and the recreation of the city is amazing.  There were all the places I'd seen, but all in the wrong place, a scrambled Edinburgh that doesn't lose any of its charm.

Mon Oncle

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) French comedy (the director's first in color) that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film that year. Tati had been making comedy films for 20 years by this time, and he was startling to settle his silent anarchic character Mr. Hulot as something of a stick-in-the-mud in the French landscape, preferring the noisy, quaint ramshackle of city life to the encroachment of pre-fab, angular concrete and steel slab-homes.

You know whose side he's on immediately with the first three shots as the first two pan down from a construction crane to reveal the contractors (only in a neat wrinkle they're the film's credits, with the title scrawled like graffiti on a stone wall in an alleyway that becomes the early morning run for a pack of dogs who pee on everything in sight and raid the garbage receptacles for food. 

Immediately the messy brick and mortar of old France is linked to the natural and everything just beyond its broken metal fence is restrictive, mechanical, and regimented. The "yard" is landscaped sand and pebbles, with paver stones as path-ways although what they're protecting other than orderliness is hard to fathom.The house itself, the main set of the film, is a square monstrosity with bug-eyed windows on the second floor, which will be used to hilarious effect later in the film. 

And the interior is spartan with uncomfortable metal furniture that appears never to have been sat on. The kitchen has every sort of gadget you could imagine and some for comedy of the automated variety. It is here that Hulot's sister lives with her family, her husband working in "coal derivatives" (though the company's main function seems to be the manufacture of plastic hoses) and her son chaffing against the sterile environment.

He'd much rather be with his Uncle (Tati), who by contrast lives in a rooftop apartment from which he can watch the city. To get there, he must make his way through a most circuitous 3-dimensional maze of stairs and hallways before reaching his front door. The life he lives is unorganized without the benefit of car or clock and the open neighborly village life suits him, rather than living behind the locked gates (remote controlled, naturally) of her sister's domicile.By this time in his career, Tati could milk comedy out of every situation embracing chaos in a clickety-clack, buttoned-up synthetic world. Mon Oncle, with its narrow focus has all the cover-the-comedic-bases charms of Chaplin, but especially the mechanical engineering of Keaton, while maintaining it all in a limited space. And with each film, Tati was becoming more adept at integrating sound into a silent world (Hulot is always silent but still manages to get his point across to the chattering populace anyway). The plastic offices have a perpetual hum, the factory is hermetically sealed by hydraulic doors and every gadget and goo-gah has its own personality and rhythm. Hulot's neighborhood is an uneven sprawl of city-sounds, dogs barking and kids playing. Tati is starting to become a welcome habit with me as he recalls the delights of the silent stars, but also the most disciplined of the "Looney Tunes" sensibility (Isn't that ironic?).

M. Hulot's Holiday

M. Hulot's Holiday aka "Les Vacances de M. Hulot" (Jacques Tati, 1953) Ya know, it's a funny thing about comedy. So much of it depends on opposition, and the mechanics of opposition--not so much a study in contrasts as having contrasts bump into each other and fall down a man-hole (or, sorry, a sewer-hole).

I learned an interesting word the other day: antimetabole. It's particularly noticeable in politics, speechifying and election years: it's simple turning of phrases is pleasing to the listener, and it's necessarily simple concepts seem to carry more depth than there is. During the Democratic Convention, Pres. Clinton used the phrase "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

Comedy is like that. The court and spark, the yin when you shoulda yanged of comedy is what makes us laugh. Andrew Sarris in his encyclopedic "The American Cinema" mentioned (in his article on Richard Lester) that The Marx Brothers represented a free insanity in a rigid, sane world, whereas The Beatles represented freeing sanity in a rigid, insane world.

And so, Jacques Tati. Tati's M. Hulot spends the movie being the square peg in a round hole. Tati has a great deal of fun presenting the rigid schedule of a vacation resort (Vacation? Rigid? Aren't they antithetical--oh, yeah, that's right...comedy) only to see Hulot wander about as the human monkey wrench sticking in the gears. He's Joe Btsfplk, with a silver lining. He's a "cooler"--to use the Vegas term, and movie title. He wanders about light as a straw, breaking every camel's back. Then suddenly, waiters who've done very well going in the right door into the kitchen and the left door out, are suddenly colliding in transit to the cacophony of falling plates and platters. Peace is preserved when his little black cloud of a car rattles off into the distance.

But he's not a walking example of anarchy. He's not bad luck. He's a perpetual "newbie," without the benefits of beginner's luck. And he's vaguely, very vaguely, aware of his effect on things. But he rolls on, regardless.

The lovely thing about Tati is that he's basically making silent comedies with sound overlay. And the dependence on the visual for his effects puts emphasis on the mechanical, and the habitual which are ripe for disruption. Hilarity ensues, loudly or not. Tati's ambitions grew and grew, culminating in the mammoth Playtime. I'll have to check that one out.

Supposedly, there's an un-produced Tati script, The Illusionist, that is being produced as animation, and the director is Sylvain Chomet--who produced The Triplettes of Belleville.*

Now that is a match made among the spun cotton clouds of cinematic heaven.

The Tati statue at Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, the film's location.
Vandal's broke off M. Hulot's trademark pipe.

* And the most famous one is "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

**Well, he kinda said it. I added a couple of words. And it's an antimetabole.

*** It was. It is. There's a review from the time of the film's release in a couple weeks.

Jour de Fête

Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949) Tati's first feature length film, featuring the protagonist, François the rural postman (played by Tati), and many of the jokes re-bicycled from his 1947 short The School for Postmen. Tati expands it with the story of a town's preparations for a big festival, and all the dangers for mayhem that accompany a feature of fun.  

Francois is on his daily rounds, done at their usual leisurely pace, but even more so for all the trouble the slightly officious fâcheux of a mailman can find to distract himself. But, the next day, inspired by an newsreel of how Americans are improving the speed of their mail delivery, he endeavors to increase the tempo of his route.

That's it in a nutshell, but the details, as with most silent comedies (although Jour de Fête isn't silent), are where the enjoyable bits are. François is a more manic character than Tati's laid-back Mr. Hulot, and has a puppy-like fascination with just about everything and a cat-killing curiosity that gets him into both hot and cold water. He is everybody's dork with a title, sure of himself and the only one in the room who is. But his intentions are good.  His results are variable.

Tati filmed Jour de Fête twice, one version in black and white, and another using a color process called Thomson-color, a dicey system and lab that, unfortunately, went out of business before the film could be processed. The black and white version was released to success, but to Tati's dissatisfaction. In 1962, he re-released it with a sub-plot about a sketch artist making pictures of the festival, and as the artist added colors to his black and white drawings, the colors would appear in the film, hand-tinted onto the film (this is the version of it I saw). Increasingly, as the day wears on, more and more parts of the fair are tinted, sometimes surprising in what the choices are. 

Thirteen years after Tati's death, his daughter Sophie and French cinematographer Françoise Ede (who'd made a documentary about Tati's Playtime) managed to find the color elements and restore the Thomson-color version for the 1995 DVD release in France. 

It was released—along with the black-and-white and tinted versions—in 2014 as a Criterion release.

The Three Lives of Jour de Fête

Black and White

Tinted

Color