Me And Hulot Down By The Schoolyard

Today's daunting task boys and girls, is that I will take on Tati for a second time, an arduous journey I assure thee; the most difficult aspect was keeping within the confines of objectivity, for this man, the myth, the mon oncle - makes up one third of my personal holy trinity of auteurs :

In the 1950's the great Jacques Tati,( born Jacques Tatischeff in the Ile-de-France,1907) laid claim to being the most innovative creator of comedies France had ever produced. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday,1953) became an overnight world-wide favorite. Once again as in Jour de fete (Day of the Fair,1949) using an authentic background, that of Saint-Marc-sur-mer in Brittany, the film was a sardonic take on the archetypal French holiday in the sun - it would introduce the frightening whilst simultaneously endearing character of Hulot - who charged into the peculiarly brittle fabric of riparian society with all the gusto and misapprehension of a toddler. And despite his overall air of desperate improvisation, Hulot's misadventures were quite meticulously planned. Hulot has remained on view in all subsequent works of Tati.

He has remnants of many screen jesters, namely in his embarrassment at the problem of how to assimilate and what to do with himself in a world of patently ill-suited, one in which he is ill-at-ease in, awkward and insular  Tati's Hulot  worked harder than anyone else at achieving this task of integration - the tennis match of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and the garden party scene in 1958's Mon Oncle, show him at his most frenzied and frazzled to keep up appearances - but a certain jauntiness in the angle of pipe and umbrella, the nattiest of hats, and a private choreography of walk in which he seems to choose his own private Idaho road - along invisible stepping stones, imply that secretly he has no compunctions about his static eccentricity in a world inevitably evolving. He is a tender anarchist, overly polite and affectionate, disarmingly shaking the nonsense out of every of his contemporaries; if they cannot be contented , at least he finds his own zen in isolation.

Tennis personne?

In Mon Oncle - which was released after nearly a year of shooting, cutting and dubbing - Hulot often seems withdrawn, a recluse in his own comfortable part of town, albeit his struggle to assimilate continues. Mon Oncle proceeds to a quietly biased, sentimental comparison between the outmoded and the new and the widening gulf between the two points.

Tati's brolly, hat and pipe were practically living things.

Hulot's endearing hermit - was the model for a decade of drop-outs, but his unswerving love and kindness and his particularly imperturbable good manners were his archaic and quixotic armor in an era of cold computerized dehumanization.

Teaching an ol' Tati new tricks. From Mon Oncle

Playtime emerged after a long hiatus for Hulot in 1968. Tati had devoted three full years constructing and fine-tuning the production, equipped with a then exorbitant $1.5 million budget. Hulot aimlessly roams from glass box to glass box in a newfangled, modern Paris, a ghost in a procession of repetitive and amusing incongruities. The accidents are all serendipitous. Like fellow auteur Michelangelo Antonioni, Tati emboldens his anti-urban argument by letting the architecture be the dominating force, but went a stage further by constructing his own personal studio city that plays on like an Escherian maze enclosing experimental mice, and like those certain holiday makers of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, the mice are all recognizable types - the American tourists abroad, the German sales clerks, the little old ladies who need to mend a simple electric lamp only to find that such expertise is simply unavailable in today's sophistication, the bickering old married couples, waiters who never manage to serve anything to their hungry masses. Hulot ultimately forges a tentative acquaintanceship with an American lass and eloquently offers her a gift to take back home - a small bouquet of plastic flowers. International or not, it provides a somber symbol for the film as a whole, precise, well-meant, a spectacular piece of craftsmanship but not much a substitute for reality - but that was a really good thing.

Cubiclism. Hulot's penultimate presence in 1967's Playtime.

In the case of his subsequent and penultimate feature Traffic (1970) Tati was on happier ground. Hulot is now a driver in a convoy of new automobiles en route from Paree to an international motor show in Holland. More prominent as a character than in Playtime, but still a model of detachment, he has come to terms with progress to the extent that he tends to have the solution to such problems as breakdowns, traffic jams, and car accidents. All the while offering good sense with his contemporaries who swarm about in counter-productive dissonance. Tati satirizes all the less lethal driving habits, stringing together an amiable line of sight-gags - like a squashed shape under a car's wheel that could be perhaps a small canine in rigor mortis or a discarded frock- which have an edge to them that is discreetly blunted to avert the shedding of blood. Discretion, painstaking details and subtlety after all are each of the essence when it comes to Tati's signature brand of humor.