Rent or Buy (From The Oxford Times)

Rent or Buy

8:31am Thursday 12th November 2009

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Jacques Tati died 27 years ago on Bonfire Night. He remains France's greatest comic and one of its finest and most fearless film-makers. The release of a boxed set of five key features by the BFI is, therefore, a cause for celebration and an opportunity for those who have yet to be touched by Tati's genius to treat themselves to gems they will watch repeatedly.

Jacques Tatischeff was born in Le Pecq in 1908. He trained as an artist and played rugby to a decent standard before becoming a music-hall turn, whose celebrated sporting impersonations bore the influence of Max Linder, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Having learned screencraft while making shorts like Soigne ton gauche (1936), Tati acted in two features for Claude Autant-Lara before directing himself in the L'École des facteurs (1947), which was essentially a dress rehearsal for Jour de Fête (1949).

Tati had spent the latter part of the Second World War voluntarily exiled in Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre and he had returned to shoot L'École des Facteurs. So where better to set the story of François, a postman who is so impressed by the film he sees during the sleepy village's Bastille Day celebrations about the US postal system that he sets out to bring the same speed and efficiency his own humble bicycle service.

Tati planned to produce France's first colour picture by shooting in Thomson-Color. However, he was warned that this experimental process was unstable and, so, he wisely opted to make a monochrome record as back-up.

The story of the lab's failure to process the Thomson stock is now part of film lore. But Tati's editor daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, and cinematographer François Ede used cutting-edge technology to develop the negative and, between 1987-94, they painstakingly pieced together Sophie's interpretation of her father's original intention. Her major amendment was the removal of a young painter Tati had added when he re-edited and re-mixed Jour de Fête in 1964. Indeed, he had never been wholly pleased with the film and had immediately revised it following a less than auspicious Parisian premiere.

However, there's an irony that modern techniques should have been used to create this approximation of Tati's design, as the clash between tradition and progress is one of the comedy's key themes. Indeed, Tati's mock homage to American efficiency could now be viewed as an advanced warning of the perils of globalisation, as he clearly felt caught between gratitude to the nation that had liberated France and resentment at the cultural cost that was being exacted by the economic aid bestowed under the Marshall Plan.

Establishing Tati's twin penchants for the comic counterbalance of sound and image and for allowing gags to unfold in their own the time and space, this remains a wonderfully fresh and funny film. Tati's own performance as the ungainly, but dauntlessly buoyant postie is a masterclass in silent pantomime. But the juxtaposition of this slapstick poetry with the precisely detailed pastoral idyll gives this unceasing delight an aching nostalgia to match its frantic energy.

Having won the prize for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, Tati drew an Oscar nomination for the script for his second feature, the peerless Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953).

Tati was the heir of the silent clowns, as he saw comedy primarily as a visual medium. However, his films were infinitely more democratic, as anyone or anything within the frame could potentially be amusing. Thus, while his genial alter ego was the notional hero of this glorious seaside farce, it was very much an ensemble piece, as visitors to the tiny resort of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer try to relax in spite of the courteous, affable and hugely accident-prone M. Hulot, who is so committed to making the most of his vacation that he barely notices the comic chaos that follows in his wake.

The action was filmed in Brittany in 1951. At its heart was a quixotic everyman whose angular posture and apologetic flounce belied his genius for the inadvertent mayhem that impacted upon himself and his fellow guests. He plays his gramophone too loudly, disrupts card games, creates drafts and almost causes someone to drown. But, he also plunges into the sea while helpfully carrying suitcases and gets dragged along the beach by a runaway horse. Yet, the only thing that gets hurt is pride, as there's nothing malicious about Tati's precise pantomime.

Every gag is timed to perfection, whether it's the boat bobbing on the tide as Hulot attempts to paint it, his manic exploits at tennis and ping-pong or his frustrations with a wonky picture and a pesky rug. Much of the slapstick business recalled Tati's music-hall act. But he also launched a satirical assault on the modern world, as various modes of transport conspired to confound the hapless holiday-makers.

Yet, despite the stage origins of Tati's physical technique, his directorial tactics were wholly cinematic. In the absence of dialogue, sound took on a key comic role, with the audio and the visual frequently conniving at duping the audience into expecting pay-offs that never arrive in the anticipated form. Moreover, Tati also kept his camera at a distance to allow viewers to discover the gags in their own time. Indeed, it was an almost Hitchcockian approach to humour, as Tati built up the comic suspense.

But Hulot's greatest achievement was its liberating contravention of the rules of screen storytelling that had existed since the heyday of DW Griffith. This quiet revolution had an incalculable impact on the nouvelle vague, making this is much more than an assemblage of comic cuts - it's a masterclass in filmic innovation.

Tati further distanced himself from the mainstream formula with Mon Oncle (1958), an acutely observed parody of the dehumanising impact of gadgetry on modern life in which he not only made inspired use of props and exaggerated sounds, but further disavowed the notion of a star vehicle by so refining his `democratic comedy' technique as to afford a key supporting role a canine cast led by Daki the dachshund.

Recalling Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), this is a typically whimsical, yet incisive satire on mechanised madness that sees Hulot fall foul of both his sister's soulless, state-of-the-art residence and her charmlessly civilised social circle. But while Madame Arpel (Adrienne Servantie) and her hose tycoon husband Charles (Jean-Pierre Zola) fail to fathom Hulot's discomfort in their mod-con milieu, their 10 year-old son Gerard (Alain Bécourt) dotes on the bachelor uncle who strides everywhere in his trademark raincoat and fedora, with a pipe fixed between his teeth, an umbrella clenched in his fist and his trousers flapping defiantly at half-mast.

Gerard particularly enjoys their walks back from school, as Hulot takes him through the very kind of colourful, crowded, cobbled streets that had been demolished to make way for automated monstrosities like Chez Arpel. Tati worked closely with production designer Henri Schmitt to ensure that everything about the place had a newfangledness whose superficial voguishness belied its inconvenience and unusability. Access can only be gained by an electronic gate, while the garden is an offence to nature, whose rigid formalism and phoniness is capped by an aluminium fish that spurts water on the push of a button whenever the family has notable company.

The furniture is equally arriviste and uninviting and Hulot feels as out of place here as he does at Charles's factory, where, on his first day, he manages to produce a hosepipe that resembles a sausage and leave footprints on the personnel manager's desk. Madame Arpel's attempts to matchmake him with a spinster friend prove similarly unsuccessful. Yet Hulot bears nobody any malice and passes no comment on his sister's bourgeois aspirations. Instead, he continues to potter through his own shambolic life, delighting in the song of a neighbour's canary and the flirtatious innocence of the concierge's daughter, Betty (Betty Schneider).

Belying hours of punctilious preparation, each gag seems positively spontaneous as Tati puts progress in its place by extolling the virtues of human contact. The action is virtually wordless, but the meticulously constructed soundtrack is just as crucial to Tati's vision as the physical humour. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and took the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But it would be Tati's last unqualified success, as his artistic ambition began to outstrip his commercial viability.

Although the short Cours du soir (1967) owed much to Tati's stage act, his features were becoming increasingly complex in structure and theme. But he often struggled to raise funding and nine years elapsed before he was able to release Playtime (1967), another spoof on contemporary mores that was filmed in 70mm and staged at `Tativille', a vast, purpose-built set with fully functioning buildings that gave the impression of life being lived while actually emphasising the alienating detachment of urban ennui.

Hulot is essentially part of the ensemble in this melancholic meditation on dehumanisation. He's first seen arriving at Orly Airport at the same time as a party of American tourists, who can't see any great difference between Paris, their home town of New York and their most recent stopover, Hamburg. Swept along by this tide of chattering, confused humanity, Hulot misses a business appointment and wanders into an exhibition on the concourse, where he is mistaken for an employee and typically proves too polite to correct the error.

Eventually, he emerges back into the `real' world and bumps into an old army buddy, who invites him home for a drink. But this proves to be anything but a private encounter, as the window of the family's apartment acts like a giant television screen that frames every action and gesture for the amusement of bypassers and neighbours alike. However, Hulot is soon able to blend into the background again, as he finds himself at the grand opening of a swanky new nightclub, whose first-night calamities not only encapsulate Tati's views on the absurdity of modernity, but also demonstrate his supreme mastery of his medium.

Yet this wouldn't be a Tati film unless a modicum of humanity managed to peek through the sterile mechanisation and the concluding sequence in which tourist Barbara Dennek receives his bashful gift is utterly charming. But audiences were far from enchanted by this discordant city symphony and Tati was persuaded to trim 15 minutes from the original 152-minute running time. It was further reduced to around two hours after Tati was declared bankrupt and he attempted a restoration shortly before his death. The BFI version is the most complete currently available and clocks in at 125 minutes.

Undeterred, Tati began planning a series of Hulot comedies for French television. However, Dutch documentarist Bert Haanstra persuaded him to make a feature about the rise of the motor car, which he would direct (in order to secure Dutch subsidies) and Tati would headline as Hulot.

However, while Haanstra was shooting location footage in Amsterdam, Tati prevaricated over the screenplay and flirted with another backer who could ensure his artistic independence. Thus, with Haanstra quitting in disappointment, Tati was forced to close down Yes, M. Hulot! in December 1969. Yet he was back at work on Trafic the following summer, even though he needed director-to-be Lasse Hallström and the Swedish TV crew shooting a `making of' documentary to muck in during the last three days.

Trafic (1971) isn't included in the BFI set, but it is available on disc and is a must-have for Tati fans, if only because it marked the swan song of Monsieur Hulot, who is detailed to escort a revolutionary camping-car from Paris to a motor show in Amsterdam. However, he is waylaid by a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps and is fired for arriving after the exhibition is over.

Considering how much comic business was improvised during the production, this is a surprisingly structured and cogent satire, whose mockery of the motoring mentality, the faddishness of gadgets and society's growing inability to communicate makes it still seem modern and relevant nearly four decades later.

Although it's typically packed with moments of incidental amusement, Tati also devised two striking set-pieces. The first depicts a gaggle of besuited, self-important businessmen resembling a secondment from the Ministry of Silly Walks as they step over the strings marking out the exhibition hall, while the second reclaims the car crash from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), as Tati even slows down the Sennett-like carnage to show a Citroën DS performing a balletic two-wheeled leap (which is only spoiled by the reversing cars in the background betraying how the stunt was achieved).

Although it can't always be heard above the cacophonous traffic, the score was composed by Charles Dumont, who had written `Je ne regrette rien' for Edith Piaf. It proved a happy coincidence, as Tati had risked his private happiness to make his films and it's somewhat apt that Hulot, at least, was allowed to disappear into the crowd with Maria the PR girl (Maria Kimberly) for a possibly happy ending.

Sadly, the film proved to be another box-office disappointment and the only way in which Tati could keep working was to make Parade (1974) for Swedish television. The reception was again lukewarm. Yet this idiosyncratic offering provides the purest demonstration of the pantomimic genius that Tati had been honing since he made his name on the halls.

The inspiration of heroes like Linder, Chaplin and Keaton is readily evident in Tati's all-too-brief moments in the spotlight. But his tennis player is an exercise in gymnastic grace, his boxer a study in incompetent courage. He rides an invisible horse with a sublime sense of the ridiculous, while he directs traffic with the same mischievous enthusiasm that he brings to waking up a kid who has dozed off during the show.

But, as ever, Tati is not at the centre of his own film. The generosity that characterised his oeuvre means that he shares the circus ring with jugglers, acrobats, magicians and clowns, whose art he considers as important as his own. They may not do anything novel or remarkable. But their precision and dedication is obvious and it is this professionalism that Tati is so keen to celebrate, along with a dying big top tradition that he hoped to revive by making this feature for the medium that had done so much to replace it.

Tati was determined to make another feature. But he became mired in a five-year struggle to bankroll Confusion and he was still far from realising his dream when he died in 1982.

There is seemingly no longer room on British television for the balletic lunacy of cinema's knockabout titans. But Jacques Tati's distinctive brand of painstaking, but gleefully funny physicality continues to exert a strong influence on European screen comedy. There were elements of M. Hulot in Bent Hamer's recent charmer, O'Horten, while Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy almost reference Tati's entire canon in their slapstick gem, Rumba. So let's hope that this cherishable collection inspires someone with programming clout to put slapstick back on the box - and soon!

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