THE ILLUSIONIST

Written by Jacques Tati

Adapted and Directed by Sylvain Chomet

Voices by Jean-Claude Donda and Eilidh Rankin

The Illusionist (written on a card): Magicians do not exist.

It can’t be easy to be an aging magician, especially one who has to work so tirelessly just to get by. The title character in French director, Sylvain Chomet’s latest work of pure artistry, THE ILLUSIONIST, can fit his entire life into a few, tiny pieces of luggage, which he carts from one dilapidated theatre to the next, so that he can play to near empty houses whenever possible and at least afford lodging and a little to eat. Night after night, he performs the same tired tricks he’s been peddling for years, still trying to trick the world into thinking that magic can happen, when its clear from his sullen expression that he stopped believing in magic long before. It’s no wonder really that the curtain doesn’t even open for him when we first catch his act.

One day, a gig brings the illusionist (voiced by Jean-Claude Donda) to Scotland, where he meets Alice (Eilidh Rankin), a young girl who works at a local inn. She catches his act and then catches him backstage for a private encore and with that, she is convinced. Suddenly, there is someone standing in front of him who believes he is actually magical. From this point on, he becomes an illusionist of a different sort, trying to maintain her beliefs and mask his own true reasons for wanting her in his life. It isn’t clear whether he has ever had a daughter but it is clear from the way he takes care of Alice, that love has been absent for some time. Together, they get a small place at the Little Joe Hotel, which houses a variety of starving artists, from a suicidal clown to an alcoholic ventriloquist. For Alice, the whole situation is bigger than anything she’s ever known and cannot see how truly hard it is to keep up with. For her, nickels really can be found behind her ear whenever she needs them.

THE ILLUSIONIST is based on an unproduced script by French mime and comedy legend, Jacques Tati. It is said to be a letter to his daughter but there is some disagreement amongst admirers of his work, as to whether it was written for the daughter he barely saw or the daughter he never knew. Chomet certainly fills his adaptation with plenty of parental woe and disappointment but also rounds it out with complex issues like mixing art and commerce and the evolution of taste as it descends the generations. Like his last great accomplishment, LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE, Chomet works a little magic of his own, creating mostly two-dimensional art that comes to life without having to rely on effects or even silly dialogue as the film is mostly silent. So without having to resort to its own form of trickery, THE ILLUSIONIST is a truly unique and enchanting experience, which should have all who see it believing in magic by the time the curtain closes.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 3

Monsieur Hulot in the Brave New World

Jacques Tati was not a hurried or haphazard filmmaker. His third feature-length film, Mon Oncle (1958), was released five years after his second, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, and the five years Tati spent making Mon Oncle is apparent in its meticulous conception and execution. One remarkable thing about Tati's films is the clear sense of evolution from one to the next. In each successive film he seemed to take elements he had perfected in the previous film and add new ones to the mix. In this way, his movies grew progressively more complex, more sophisticated, and more ambitious, in both the technical and the thematic sense.

Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), with its emphasis on physical comedy and the precision timing of its physical gags, has much in common with the work of Buster Keaton. His second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, continues the physical comedy of Jour de Fête, although not in such a purely kinetic way, and builds on that film by intensifying the emphasis on characterization. It takes the concept of that earlier film's main character (François the village postman) as comic outsider and applies it even more assiduously to Tati's new creation, M. Hulot. Leaving in his wake a trail of comic chaos, M. Hulot becomes by the end of the movie the kind of social pariah Harold Lloyd played in movies like The Freshman.

Tati recognized that in M. Hulot he had created a perfect Everyman character, one whose simultaneous universality and individuality enabled Tati to devise nearly any conceivable comic situation around this versatile character. Keeping M. Hulot as the main character of Mon Oncle, Tati added to Keaton's physicality and Lloyd's use of character as the starting point of the story a new element: the topicality of Charles Chaplin. If Modern Times (1936)—admittedly, inspired at least in part by René Clair's A Nous la Liberté (1932)—is Chaplin's take on modernity, then Mon Oncle is the first of two movies in which Tati tackled head-on the same subject: the tribulations of the ordinary man alone and alienated in the mystifying modern world.

Yet in fact the germ of those two elements—modern life and alienation—is present in Tati's two earlier films. Consider François's flirtation with modernity in Jour de Fête, in which his disastrous experimentation with what he believes are modern American methods of postal delivery ends with his abandoning the idea and returning to traditional methods. Consider also the rather melancholic ending of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in which M. Hulot, shunned by the adults at the seaside resort where he is vacationing, ends up on the beach with the children, just about the only people in the movie who will accept his childlike but well-intentioned misbehavior. In this ending there is a sense that M. Hulot is for the first time in his life consciously aware of his apartness from other people. With such awareness inevitably comes the onset of existential alienation, and that is precisely the state Tati explores in a satirical way in Mon Oncle.

Mon Oncle opens on a construction site with the sound of jackhammers heard behind the credits. The film immediately switches to a deserted early morning street in an old section of Paris, with mellow, jazzy Parisian popular music playing on the soundtrack. To the sounds of accordion, banjo, and vibraphone, a group of dogs—several mongrels and one purebred dachshund—are cheerfully roaming, romping with one another, scrounging through the street refuse, and marking their territory. The dogs make their way through a transitional zone with the rubble of razed buildings in the foreground and newly constructed apartment buildings that look like concrete boxes in the background, eventually ending up in a new suburban neighborhood in front of an ultra-modern bungalow with a modernistic metal gate. At this point the dachshund squeezes underneath the gate and is home. This is the house of the Arpels—M. Hulot's sister, her husband, and their son, his nephew Gérard.

In the first few minutes of the film, Tati has staked out his thematic territory: the contrast between the modern world of the Arpels and the traditional world of M. Hulot. Like Tati's earlier movies, Mon Oncle is loosely constructed as a series of episodes filled with sight and sound gags. But unlike Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, where M. Hulot is at the center of each episode, here the episodes are linked conceptually, by the idea of the conflict between modernity and tradition. From the beginning it is clear where Tati's sympathies lie: Everything about the modern world is depicted as soulless, characterless, and spiritually enervating as it relentlessly destroys the old to make way for the new, as it consumes the traditional world and dehumanizes its inhabitants like M. Hulot.

M. Hulot's neighborhood, where the movie starts, is colorful and lively. It is filled with people, activity, and life lived in the open. Everywhere we hear the sounds of life—of dogs barking, music playing, and people chatting with their neighbors and with the vendors in the market stalls of the square. In the streets we see eccentric characters—a deliveryman with a horse-drawn cart; a man sweeping the streets with a crudely fashioned broom; a tipsy man in a raincoat, pajamas, slippers, and beret walking his dog on a leash; a group of disheveled schoolboys who have ditched school playing practical jokes on unsuspecting strangers.

The world of the Arpels couldn't be more different. In their neighborhood the streets are empty except for automobiles. The buildings either present blank facades to the street or, like their own house, are sequestered behind fences. While M. Hulot either walks or rides his motocyclette, M. Arpel drives his huge American Oldsmobile everywhere, delivering his son to his newly built school that looks more like a factory or prison than a school, or to his own modern factory, where his company, Plastac, manufactures plastic pipes and hoses.

In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Tati used locations to convey moods, and more specifically he used the Hôtel de la Plage, where M. Hulot spent his vacation, essentially as a character in the movie. In Mon Oncle, Tati also uses architecture and buildings as characters. M. Hulot's apartment building is a rambling, improvised structure clearly added to many times over the years without any thought of overall design. M. Hulot's apartment, on the top floor, is reached by a circuitous route up staircases, across an interior landing, down another flight of stairs, across an exterior terrace, around the side of the building, and up another flight of stairs that leads to his apartment, which appears to be a series of small rooms perched on a former rooftop.

M. Hulot's apartment building

The Arpel house, perhaps the most striking modern residence ever seen in a non-science fiction movie (it easily outdoes the houses in Leave Her to Heaven and North by Northwest), stands in total contrast to M. Hulot's building. To call this house futuristic would be an understatement. The yard leading to the front door is fragmented into geometric shapes that are paved or filled with gravel or tiny patches of precisely manicured grass. In this environment artificial flowers are preferred to real ones because "they're made to last." The few examples of real vegetation are topiary pruned into rigidly geometric forms—cubes, spheres, cones. Two plant-like structures espaliered on the wall of the house appear to be made of barbed wire, the barbs imitating leaves. Dominating all is a hideous fountain with a large, upright metal fish that vaguely resembles a marlin, spewing water dyed a cyanic blue color.

The house itself is a streamlined, two-story, block-like structure with two round windows resembling eyes in the main room of the second floor. The rooms in the uninviting, minimalist interior of the house are boxy, nearly empty of furnishings, and relentlessly colorless and monochromatic. In this house even a single leaf that has blown in from outdoors mars the perfect order and must be gingerly picked up and disposed of by the obsessively tidy Mme. Arpel. Everything in the hi-tech house that can be automated, mechanized, or turned into a gadget has been; even opening a kitchen cupboard is a complicated mechanical procedure that thoroughly confounds M. Hulot. To call this setting sterile would be putting it mildly.

The Arpels' futuristic house

But more importantly, this environment precisely reflects the way its inhabitants think and live. Theirs is a totally planned and controlled world with no room for spontaneity, a humorless place where playfulness is inappropriate, where every thing and every activity must be serious, practical, and functional. Being tidy, methodical, and productive are the most highly prized personal traits in this world. Having wholly internalized this ethos, M. and Mme. Arpel are the ultimate conformist consumers, with an almost worshipful attitude toward modernity and a fetishistic devotion to all things fashionable and up-to-date.

Only two people seem uncomfortable in this environment: M. Hulot and Gérard, the Arpels' young son. Gérard's parents attempt to instill in him their own belief in the value of the totally regimented life—scheduling his day, urging him to apply himself to productive pursuits like school and study, and discouraging him from any activities they deem frivolous. Naturally, the last includes most of the things Gérard would prefer to be doing. Just as the Arpels' dachshund Daqui enjoys roaming the streets with the mongrels of H. Hulot's shabby but colorful neighborhood, Gérard understandably prefers to play hooky and loaf with his uncle or the street kids in M. Hulot's neighborhood.

When Mme. Arpel decides that her brother is a bad influence on Gérard, she urges her husband to find M. Hulot a job in his plastics factory. This results in a long set piece—one of several in the film—that is essentially an extended version of one of the series of small misadventures in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Assigned a simple, mind-numbingly routine job—to oversee a self-regulating machine that extrudes lengths of what appears to be red plastic garden hose—M. Hulot turns an apparently foolproof job into a comic disaster. As his attention wanders, his lengths of hose, rather than being of regular and unvarying diameter, begin to resemble a string of sausages, all bulges and pinches. M. Hulot is unable either to keep up with the speed of the machine or to stop it before it extrudes a tremendous length of irregular hose that must be discarded.

Unable to perform this simple task, M. Hulot is in the end exiled by the Arpels, sent off to a new job at another factory in a different part of France. The last we see of him is as he is dropped off at the airport by M. Arpel and Gérard. It will be nine years before M. Hulot lands—in Tati's next film, Play Time (1967)—in a world even more unsettling than this one. In the brave new world of Mon Oncle, we at least see vestiges of a recognizably human environment precariously enduring the onslaught of modernity. In Play Time even those last vestiges of humanity will be gone forever.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 2

Bonjour, Monsieur Hulot!

Jacques Tati was hardly a prolific filmmaker. In the twenty-four years between 1947 and 1971, he made only five feature-length movies. The fact that so much time elapsed between films suggests the extreme amount of thought and preparation that went into the conception, filming, and post-production of each of those works.

Tati's second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), set a pattern that Tati would pretty much follow for the rest of his career. It takes up where his previous film left off (not in the narrative sense, but in cinematic terms) and then makes significant advances in many areas. Tati seemed never to want to repeat himself but always to move forward with his next movie, to take what he had already done and build on it to create something new and more ambitious. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday still has the rather loose structure of Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), consisting of a series of set pieces not strongly linked by a linear or chronological plot. The title character goes on vacation at the seaside in Brittany, becomes involved in a series of comical misadventures, and at the end returns home. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet so fertile was Tati's imagination that within this episodic theme-and-variations structure, he managed to create a movie that is fondly remembered and even loved by nearly everyone who has seen it.

The reasons for the movie's brilliance are two-fold. One is the impeccable conception and execution of each of the many brilliant gags in the movie, whether a brief sight gag or an elaborately detailed comedic set piece. These are done with the precision of a Buster Keaton or Charles Chaplin, and Tati's fusion of the physicality of Keaton and the whimsy of Chaplin is bound to remind the viewer of both of those comic geniuses. But in the absence of a strong narrative continuum, what really holds the movie together is the character of Monsieur Hulot, making his first appearance in this film. M. Hulot, who became Tati's alter ego and the main character of all his subsequent movies, is a unique creation who contains elements of Tati's idols, the trifecta of American silent comedian/filmmakers—Keaton, Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. Like the characters those three greats tended to play, M. Hulot is an oddball whose individuality causes him to be the underdog or the outsider in every situation.

The movie opens with the credits seen over shots of a peaceful, deserted beach, the only sounds those of waves breaking on the shore and mellow music playing on the soundtrack. Without warning, the scene shifts to one of pandemonium. It is August in France, and the entire country is going on vacation. In a train depot we hear loudly amplified crowd noises and see frazzled families desperately attempting to find the right train. Confused by the incomprehensible gibberish coming from the loudspeakers (it resembles the blathering noises of the dignitaries dedicating the monument at the beginning of City Lights), frenzied holiday-goers race from platform to platform.

Meanwhile on a country road we first see M. Hulot puttering along in his tiny, sputtering car as more affluent vacationers in their more powerful cars hurtle past him, leaving him in a cloud of dust. M. Hulot's ancient little car, backfiring like crazy, struggles to make it up a steep hill and comes to a dead stop before it reaches the top. Finally making it down the hill, he coasts at a leisurely pace through a quiet village the other cars have sped through, stopping for a dog sleeping in the middle of the road, and even taking time to pat its head before continuing on. This first introduction to M. Hulot succinctly tells us practically everything we need to know about him. In any competition, he will be last, for competition is not in his nature. Nor is haste or unkindness, even to dogs sleeping in the road. And unlike the other holiday-makers, he travels alone and apart from the crowd.

When M. Hulot arrives at his destination, the seaside Hôtel de la Plage, we get our first good look at him. Unlike the short Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd, M. Hulot is a tall, gangly man. He has a way of walking as distinctive as Chaplin's swaying, shuffling gait. M. Hulot walks using not just his feet and legs, but with his entire body, leaning forward and lurching ahead purposefully, bouncing on the soles of his feet with each step, at once both stiff and loose. In his dress, he is also as distinctive as his idols. Like Keaton with his pork pie hat and Chaplin with his bowler, M. Hulot wears a funny hat too. Lloyd always wears glasses; M. Hulot is seldom seen without his pipe. Chaplin's baggy clothes seem too large for such a small man; M. Hulot's clothes seem too small, the sleeves and hem of his jacket and the legs of his trousers far too short for such a large man, as though he has somehow outgrown them.

When M.Hulot walks into the lobby of the hotel to register, we get a preview of his future relationship to the staff and other guests. The lobby is filled with guests sitting and relaxing, reading novels or newspapers, sipping drinks, playing cards, listening to the hotel radio. As M. Hulot opens the door, a ferocious wind rises, and as he props the doors open, stashes his pipe in his mouth, and struggles to get two suitcases, a fish-landing net, and a tennis racquet into the hotel, the wind roars through the lobby, turning the peaceful scene into a maelstrom,

This incident creates a bad first impression from which he never recovers. The other guests, who already seem to have formed a cliquish sort of community, are united in their snobbish dislike and suspicion of the man. Even the hotel staff find him a nuisance, wondering what problem he will cause next and giving him constant dirty looks. Their watchfulness actually distracts them to the point that is causes them to do things like drop a fountain pen in an aquarium, for which, of course, they silently blame M. Hulot.

By the time he reaches the hotel, only a few minutes into the movie, the film's structure is set. The rest of the movie will consist of the comic scrapes M. Hulot gets into and the inventive means he uses not to get caught. Comparing his movies to Chaplin's, Tati once said that Chaplin's Little Tramp makes things happen, whereas things happen to M. Hulot. And he is indeed like the child who is always inadvertently getting into trouble: he may be technically responsible for the problems he causes, but he remains blameless because it is all either unintentional or the result of good intentions gone awry.

M. Hulot quickly becomes a benignly disruptive force on this little community, continually causing mischief and aggravation without meaning to. He accidentally launches a boat whose owner is painting it on the shore. He causes a shark scare on the beach (an incident that seems inspired by the boat gag in Keaton's The Balloonatic). He drives into a cemetery during a funeral, where his spare inner tube is mistaken for a funeral wreath, and to avoid embarrassing the mourners enters the receiving line and shakes hands with those attending. He kicks a man he thinks is spying on a young woman through a knothole in a changing cabin on the beach, only to find the man was really peering through the viewfinder of a tripod-mounted camera taking a picture of his family (a purely cinematic gag based on the two-dimensionality of the movie screen). He exasperates the hotel staff by leaving wet footprints in the lobby without ever being seen doing it. With one brief ill-timed push of a swiveling chair, he causes two tables of card players to believe that everyone else is cheating and to erupt into a heated fracas. His unforgettable and hilariously aggressive tennis serve defeats all who attempt to play against him: "Le tennis, c'est pas ça!" breathlessly exclaims one exhausted young opponent.

Tati links these incidents together with the periodic repetition of certain actions that essentially become unifying motifs. Two of the guests we first meet are a well-dressed elderly couple who apparently do little but take walks—she always leading, he following a few steps behind—and every few minutes we see them taking another leisurely stroll. M. Schmutz is a chubby, rather tyrannical businessman who, even though on vacation with his family, is summoned regularly to the telephone to confer with his company or his stockbroker. M. Hulot is repeatedly seen peering at the beach from the open skylight in the roof of his attic room in the hotel. The waiter rings the dining room bell for another meal. Several people have unfortunate encounters in a dark side room with a loud phonograph that is turned on by the light switch, always at the most inopportune time. M. Hulot repeatedly wakens the sleeping hotel in the middle of the night, and every time he does, we see lights in the windows of the darkened building coming on one by one.

One element Tati added to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday that wasn't in Jour de Fête is a girl, an element he kept in all his subsequent movies except Mon Oncle. The Girl was something always present in the films of the great American silent film comedians. Typically the hero's getting the girl was the motivation for his actions and provided the conclusion for the movie. But in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, as in Tati's following movies, the girl is not so much a romantic object as a chaste ideal, a representation of tolerance and non-judgment and one of the few people who relate to M. Hulot and whom he can relate to in return.

Here the girl is called Martine (Nathalie Pascaud), and she is staying in a very picturesque traditional timbered house across from the hotel. As the most attractive young woman around, she receives a lot of attention from the young men, but it is in M. Hulot's company that she seems to feel most comfortable. She appears to be amused by his child-like enthusiasms, his imperviousness to the patronizing attitude of others, and his innocent ability to deflate pomposity and self-importance. During that memorable tennis game, only Martine, looking on from the side, is amused by M. Hulot's good-natured ability to exasperate all his opponents. She even allows him to walk her home afterward.

It is M. Hulot she allows to take her to the costume dance at the hotel, one of the most delightful sequences in the movie. What a comically odd couple they make. He looks absurd in his corny pirate's costume with a bandeau, eyepatch, and one gold hoop earring. She looks lovely in her diamond-patterned Harlequinesque party dress, high heels, and Harlequin mask. And the way he dances is indescribably unique, and indescribably funny.

One of the big advances of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday over Jour de Fête is Tati's ability to succinctly define minor characters in just a few visual strokes—their clothing, facial expressions, body language, and above all reaction to M. Hulot. Martine, the strolling couple, M. Schmutz, the vacationing Englishwoman who befriends M. Hulot, the other guests at the hotel, even the hotel staff are vividly limned in no time at all, so carefully does Tati select the few details about them we're shown.

Another big advance over Jour de Fête is the refinement in Tati's use of sound. In Jour de Fête Tati was almost like a child so enamored of a new toy that he was quite unrestrained in his use of sound, at times saturating the soundtrack to the point that it threatened to overwhelm the images. In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday he takes a very different approach, one he would continue in later films. Here sound is used selectively and very deliberately. There is little dialogue, and what there is often occurs in the background; the primary means of telling the story is always visual. M. Hulot himself speaks only three times in the movie and even then utters little more than a single word. Tati once explained to an interviewer why he preferred to use dialogue so sparingly. He observed that because it's easier to be funny in one's own country using dialogue, humor based on speech tends to be national, whereas humor based on situation and movement tends to be international.

But it is Tati's use of non-spoken sounds that constitutes the most remarkable advance over Jour de Fête. The contrast between the beach and the train depot in that opening sequence, M. Hulot's car backfiring and sputtering, the phonograph suddenly blaring out the "Tiger Rag" at high volume, the frequent ringing of the dinner bell, the distinctive sound of M. Hulot's ping pong ball as he plays table tennis in the room next to the crowded but otherwise completely silent hotel lobby, the metallic "bong" the door to the dining room makes every time it is opened, even the sound of the waves breaking on the shore—all these noises are used to create specific atmospheric and comical effects. This targeted use of sound effects within silence is something Tati would continue to do with great effectiveness in the films made after Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

The most brilliant use of sound and the most brilliant set piece in the whole movie takes place just before the end. The entire hotel decides to go on a group outing for their last day together, and M. Hulot is part of the carpool that will ferry the revelers to the picnic spot. Car trouble prevents him from arriving on time, delaying the group's departure and upsetting all their careful organization. Then on the way his car has a flat tire and while he is trying to fix it slips off the jack and rolls away, taking his two passengers with it, and leaving him stranded.

That evening he has still not returned to the hotel. In the middle of the night, still trying to find his way back to the hotel, he wanders into a storage shed on the beach and lights a match to get his bearings. The shed happens to be packed with fireworks, and as the various fireworks explode in the otherwise soundless night, they fizz, crackle, boom, whiz, and squeal. They shoot into the air, burst in spectacular patterns, cascade through the night sky, whirl in circles, and bombard the hotel, wakening the entire hotel and throwing it into a panic.

The next day is the end of the vacation, and the holiday-makers gather in front of the hotel to say good-bye to one another—exchanging addresses, promising to keep in touch, expressing hopes of seeing one another next year. But for M. Hulot there are no fond farewells, for the fiasco of the night before has been the last straw, and he is pointedly excluded from the fulsome camaraderie. Shunned, he makes his way to the beach and sits with the children, with whom his temperament has more in common than with their uptight parents. Two people, however, do make a point of saying good-bye to him: the Englishwoman who has never really been part of the group and the henpecked little man who has been strolling with his wife the entire time. M. Hulot's friends are dogs, children, and the other pariahs of the group. At the end of the movie, the beach concessions are being boarded up, the beach is once again deserted, and M. Hulot drives away alone in his little car, the last to leave. We don't know where he came from, and it will be five years, until Tati's next movie, Mon Oncle (1958), before we learn where he is returning to.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 1

For a man who directed only five full-length films released between 1949 and 1972, the French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982) has a huge reputation among cinephiles. Two of his movies, Play Time (1967) and Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), were in 2008 named by the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma among the 100 greatest films of all time. Predictably, only a handful of movies on the list were comedies, including the two by Tati. He was recognized along with other comic masters like Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Woody Allen, a pretty impressive group of people to be included among. While most Americans who know anything at all about movies and popular culture are familiar with those names, I wonder how many know of Tati, much less recognize that among aficionados of film comedy his reputation is the equal of those other well-known geniuses.

Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff in France in 1907, the son of a Russian father and Dutch mother. As a young man he served in the French cavalry and was for a while a professional sports player. These are important facts to keep in mind because in his films the 6' 3" tall, gangly Tati often portrayed an ungainly klutz. Yet like that trifecta of silent comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—he was an extremely agile man whose awkwardness was entirely—and brilliantly—simulated in remarkable feats of physical acting that rival those of his illustrious predecessors.

This was made clear in a short film he made in 1967, Cours du Soir (Night Class), filmed on leftover sets from Play Time (and included in the Criterion edition of Play Time). Here he portrays his famed alter ego, M. Hulot, as an instructor conducting a night class on comic acting for aspiring comedians. In the course of the 30-minute long film, Tati reveals some remarkable insights into his professional technique.

At the beginning of the class and at times throughout it, he succinctly summarizes the gist of the lesson. "Observe! Observe!" he keeps telling his students: Watch carefully the way people express themselves through their body language, and draw your inspiration from that. In character, he demonstrates to his students how to convey character types through facial expressions, physical gestures, and posture and bearing. What we have is essentially a simulation of his direction of the actors in his movies, with Tati acting the parts to show his performers what he wants them to do. He also demonstrates his still impressive horse-riding skills (remember that he was 60 years old at the time) while showing the students how to use various styles of horsemanship to convey character.

Most tellingly, he demonstrates to his students how to take a pratfall while walking up a short flight of stairs, about three steps. Tati makes it look so effortless that all the students are eager to give it a try. One student even attempts to analyze and diagram M. Hulot's movements mathematically. Yet every single student fails to do successfully what seemed so simple when Tati did it. Their attempts at reproducing his pratfall are truly inept and not in the least comic. Although real, their pratfalls don't seem at all realistic. Only Tati is able to act with his body, to simulate clumsiness, in such a convincing way as to produce humor. What he makes appear so easy to his students is actually a feat of accomplished acting skill and great physical control.

After being in the cavalry and playing sports, Tati eventually became a music hall performer. He performed one of his acts in the movie Parade, which he directed for Swedish television in 1974. Portraying a horse rider in a circus act, he plays the parts of both the rider and the trained horse. From the waist up he is the rider, from the waist down the horse, and he simultaneously imitates both with absolute precision. The French writer Colette described Tati as a centaur in this act, and it is a truly impressive demonstration of his physical and mimetic skills.

Tati first became a film maker when he filmed some of his acts and later co-directed a short film, Gai Dimanche (Jolly Sunday) in 1935. He wrote and acted in small roles in a few movies from the mid-1930's to the mid-1940's, including a short about boxing directed by René Clément, Soigne Ton Gauche (Watch Your Left), made in 1935 and two full-length features directed by Claude Autant-Lara, notably Devil in the Flesh (1947). That same year Tati directed his first solo short film, L'Ecole des Facteurs (School for Postmen). (He reproduced part of this film in Cours du Soir.)

In 1947 he also directed his first full-length film, Jour de Fête (released sixty years ago in 1949), a movie about a village postman, played by Tati himself, that included some ideas inspired by L'Ecole des Facteurs. The movie began as a short film about an overly enthusiastic postman who sees a newsreel feature about modern methods of mail delivery in the U. S. (a very funny film-within-a-film) and tries to adapt them to his own situation, with comically disastrous results. Tati then took the character he created and built around him an entire movie that runs 79 minutes in its restored version and integrates the original short that inspired it as a concluding set piece.

The postman's name is François, and he is quite a character. François is in many ways a forerunner of M. Hulot, the comic persona Tati would assume in his next four feature-length films. François is in all ways extreme. An unusually tall man, he is in constant motion, and his movements are awkward, jerky, and very funny. Even the way he rides his bicycle is comical. He is enthusiastic about everything, and his enthusiasms are all oversized. The movie opens with a traveling carnival arriving in a small provincial French town and setting up for the Bastille Day celebrations. The first thing they do is try to set up a large flagpole in the town square.

As soon as François rides into the scene, he throws himself zealously into helping set up the flagpole and has soon commandeered the process, directing everyone else in a scene full of physical comedy built around the ungainliness of the huge flagpole. After the flagpole is finally set up, François walks over to the café-bar for a coffee, and the flagpole collapses, just missing him as he walks through the door, in a moment clearly reminiscent of the house facade falling on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The thing François is most enthusiastic about—almost to the point of fanaticism—is his job as the village postman. So officious is François that he behaves as though he truly believes his job is the most important thing in the village. When he sees that newsreel about the American postal service, he immediately throws himself with nearly manic fervor into adapting its aims of efficient and speedy mail delivery to his own job. "Rapidité!" becomes his mantra, and he repeats it until it becomes absurdly funny.

Because of his inflated sense of enthusiasm and his belief in his own significance to the fabric of village life, the other villagers treat him as a "character," joking about him behind his back and making him the object of gentle ridicule in much the same way Harold Lloyd was treated in many of his movies (and here I'm thinking particularly of The Freshman). At one point they conspire to get him drunk under the pretense of playing pool with him for beer. This gives Tati the opportunity to demonstrate his skill at physical comedy by doing a drunk routine, much as Chaplin and W. C. Fields did in many of their movies, always a sure-fire way of getting laughs.

François is essentially the classic comedy outsider, the oddball who doesn't fit in with conventional society. In this way François foreshadows Tati's later creation M. Hulot, whose essential character trait is this same sense of apartness, a sense that became more pronounced with each successive film. It's not exactly alienation, for he never seems completely aware of it, nor does it seem to distress him unduly. Yet there is an implicit element of melancholy in this state of comic outsiderhood. This same sense of melancholy is also present to a degree in the characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. If I mention them, it is to show that Tati knew his American silent film comedians thoroughly and synthesized aspects of their work with his own original inspiration.

In its final form Jour de Fête is beautifully constructed. It begins with a wizened old lady leading her goat around the village and talking to it, acting like a chorus, introducing us to each of the villagers. This is followed by the arrival of the carnival. The movie concludes the next day with the carnival being dismantled and leaving town. At the same time, François is trying out his new techniques of mail delivery, an effort that ends with his riding his bicycle at full speed into a canal in an arduous physical stunt reminiscent of Buster Keaton. The movie closes with François getting a ride with the little old lady and her goat, now driving a cart into the village.

One remarkable thing about Jour de Fête, particularly when compared with Tati's later movies, is how much sound there is in it. In later films, Tati used sound quite sparingly and used both it and silence in very deliberate ways to create specific effects. But Jour de Fête is filled with sound—jaunty, jazzy music on the soundtrack, ambient sounds and music, sound effects, and lots of dialogue, both essential dialogue in the foreground and nonessential dialogue in the background. In a night scene that takes place in the country, the soundtrack is even filled with the natural night sounds of the countryside.

One final observation about Jour de Fête: With its location filming and largely non-professional cast, it gives the viewer a vivid picture of a traditional small village (Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre) in post-World War II southern France almost untouched by modernity. In the entire movie, an automobile appears only once, briefly speeding through the village. Jour de Fête captures a time, a place, and a way of life that have vanished forever. Considering the film in this light makes both it and the movies that followed it—with their recurring theme of rampant modernity draining the humanity and soul from contemporary life—all the more poignant.

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This is the first of a multi-part retrospective of the career and films of Jacques Tati. Other installments will appear in future editions of The Movie Projector.