Tatis Schützenfest

With Jour de Fete, French genius Jacques Tati began exploring many themes that littered his quite wonderful career. The plot is, like many of his works, very simple and is centred around one very basic idea - here the bumbling postman Francois, played by Tati. The small rural town of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre is visited by a travelling fair, who bring joy and colour to an otherwise quiet area. Francois goes quietly about his business under the nose of the village-folk who hardly seem to notice him, apart from when they're making fun of him or getting him drunk. After seeing a documentary showing the advanced methods of postal delivery in the U.S., Francois makes use of everything around him to make his own service as fast and efficient as in America.

Clocking in at only 70 minutes, this is certainly Tati's least ambitious project, but he was very much honing his craft (this was his directorial début . His reputation as the Antonioni of slapstick is evident, as Tati feels just as comfortable watching the simple and natural interaction of the village's inhabitants in the quite beautiful rural landscape, as he is falling on his arse. Tati barely appears for the first twenty minutes or so, which is relatively laugh-free, but these early scenes are important in understanding the point of the film. By having such a calm and naturalistic opening, Francois' desperate struggle to meet the demands of a society relying increasingly on technology becomes all the more ridiculous. And there lies the satire, something that he explored more head-on and ambitiously in Playtime (1967).

Not to say Jour de Fete is without ambition, as Tati was so dedicated to his craft that he shot the film on two cameras - one with standard black-and-white photography that was the norm in 1949, and one with Thomsoncolour, a quite primitive and experimental colourising process. Thomsoncolour went bust before the film was released, and Tati was forced to release the black-and-white version that circulated for years. Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff and cinematographer Francois Ede managed to release the film in it's original colour in 1995, but the film looks grainy, damaged and diluted. Yet it's nice to think that Tati thought his work and vision was too grand for black-and-white, and he's right. Although this is by far the least laugh-out-loud of Tati's work that I've seen, there is plenty here to hint at the genius to come, namely the quite brilliant final few frames that has an excited child running after the leaving fair, gradually shrinking in the distance.

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When I first saw this film I couldn't get it out of my head, and put it in my all time top ten. The magic has faded a little, but this remains a classic for its strange mixture of gentle slapstick, sight gags and verbal jokes, and its beautifully atmospheric portrait of French rural life.

This first, non-Hulot comedy feature by France's Tati, who derives from the silent greats and can keep company with them too, centers on his gangly bicycling postman Francois, mingling with the many and varied denizens of a tiny, ancient French village. When the carnival comes to town, a tent cinema shows a movie of the hilariously high-tech, high-speed, muscleman American postmen, the insecure Francois first gets very drunk and then is seized with the urge to do his job very, very fast. Gentle, sharp-eyed, teeming with life, this isn't even regarded as one of his best, but after trying for years this screening finally brought me around to LOVING Tati. For one thing it's a love letter to bicycles, a sure sell for the surprisingly large Bike Week audience that came out to Cinecycle for this screening. For another thing there are more articulated personalities in this movie than there are in any dozen current releases; EVERYONE is acutely drawn, from the woman in the high window to the recurring character of the buzzing bug. It's a goddam tapestry of humanity, and as a result it's positively moving as well as laugh-out-loud funny. It's also very cinematic in spite of its antiquity, most obviously in some out-of-nowhere colorization, but also in compositions that pay off in a much less rigidly controlled way than any comparable American comedy - the good stuff is often happening in the corner of the frame, like a good Mad comic with a halo.

Personally, I think Tati's films are hilarious; but they're not to all tastes. Some have told me that they loathe his work. I've never figured out why, but I think it's because the character that Tati usually plays himself is so totally dead pan, so unaffected by the events around him (which he is usually causing) that many miss the more subtle comic bits happening that effectively generate his environment.

At any rate, Tati's main shtick - or at least his best known - is to take a pretentiously upright petite bourgeoisie with 19th century sensibilities and drop him into 20th century France where he must confront a society that is largely defined by the gradual eroding of those sensibilities. He usually has serious difficulties with little things like record players or radios. He's a hazard in a car, but the world's no safer when he rides a bicycle. But through it all, he never loses his aplomb, which is derived from his inner recognition that the nineteenth century was more interesting than the 20th overall.

In this film, the 20th Century is best (or worst) represented by the recurring presence of Americans. Around the time of the release of this film, the French began to worry that the American, who had liberated them from the Germans, might never go away - a worry that remains influential in French politics to this day, and with some justification. Certainly Tati's postman, on his humble bicycle, appears to be no match at all for the Americans in their motor vehicles - except that his innocent buffoonery somehow manages to get the best of them every time.

That give's the film a slight satirical edge, and one which leaves a real impression. Otherwise, we still have the imperturbable Tati, whom "neither rain nor snow nor sleet" - whatever.

Enjoyable and wholly entertaining.

I could watch this postman delivering letters to the citizens of this little town for hours. Although it's not as colorful as Tati's more popular movies it doesn't mean that it doesnt' have it's charms, it's filled with great slapstick comedy and that always works for me. I always see this being last on Tati's ranked list but so far it's my favourite of his (still have to watch Playtime and Traffic).