Trafic

Tati's final theatrical film, which is often considered his greatest failure, is in actuality nearly as good as his masterpieces. In this film, Tati stars for the fourth and final time as M. Hulot. This time he has a job as an automobile designer, and it is his job to get his company's new Camping Car to Amsterdam for a big auto show. Accompanying him is a driver, François, and a public relations worker, Maria (played marvelously by Maria Kimberly, who reminds us of the great lead actress roles played by Nathalie Pascaud and Barbara Denneck in M. Hulot's Holiday and Playtime respectively). Maria drives around in a little yellow convertible with her little fur-ball dog. Its fast and maneuverable. It can go pretty much anywhere it wants. Unfortunately, François and M. Hulot are driving a large truck. They often get into trouble when they're trying to follow Maria's car. Every problem that can happen does. Many observations are made about how people act when they're in their cars on the highway (it's a non-stop traffic jam from Paris to Amsterdam). The jokes in Traffic are always hilarious. The first fifteen or twenty minutes are somewhat dry of them, which is mainly why I don't rank this one up there with M. Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Playtime (it's about even with Jour de fête). But when it gets going, it never stops. And it's beautiful, too, just as all of his other films. The final sequence is sublime, and the final shot will stay with me forever. 9/10.

What can we make of Trafic, Jacques Tati's last film? It certainly isn't a major success, as M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle are. It's not a gallant failure, as I believe Playtime is. It seems to me that it is a sad, sometimes amusing combination of those things that made Tati so unique, so funny, so problematic and so drawn to making mundane social commentary. There must be something in the water we drink or the bread we eat that causes some humans with extraordinary artistic gifts to believe that because they are great artists they also must have equally great gifts of social philosophy, gifts which they are determined to share with us.

By the time Tati made Trafic, four years after Playtime, he had lost ownership of his life's work, his films, and most of his money. Playtime was a debacle. He spent a fortune, his own as well as others, to craft a perfectionist's dream of artistic control. He ended up with a movie that was filled with surprises, layer on layer of -- for wont of a better term -- sight and sound gags, with fascinatingly complex amusements for an audience willing to let the situations develop around them, and seemingly endless, obvious and often impersonal visual commentary on the homogenizing of modern society and the perils of technology. Most moviegoers were not all that interested.

Now, with Trafic, Mr. Hulot has come back. He is a designer for a Paris auto company, and he has developed a camping vehicle like no other. Trafic is the story of Mr. Hulot's delivery of his camper from Paris to an international auto show in Amsterdam. It's a long journey filled with misunderstandings, accidents and crashes, a PR executive with an endless number of dress changes, cops, windshield wipers and a lot of cars. The movie is as exquisitely built as an expensive vest pocket timepiece. Unfortunately, time has a way of catching us up, and Mr. Hulot now is a man past middle age, where male innocence seems unlikely and somewhat unattractive. Tati was 64 now, and he looks it. The gentle, innocent mime who meets unexpected personal situations at a small seaside hotel or tries to help his young nephew has been replaced by a well-meaning older gentleman we more often observe than we root for. His encounters with the clichés of faceless technology and bumbling bureaucracy are increasingly with people with few understandable, sympathetic foibles. Mr. Hulot to be at his best needs people we can come to like and interact with, not simply interchangeable stand- ins...even if they're picking their noses in the privacy of their cars (in a sight gag probably only Tati could have pulled off).

Mr. Hulot only appeared in four feature-length movies. It is Tati's genius that in less than 500 minutes he gave us such a memorable and appealing human being. Tati's layering of sight gags is unique and often intensely and unexpectedly funny. With Trafic, however, I found my interest more intellectual than anything else. There were stretches of the film that simply weren't all that engaging. And this, of course, is all just opinion.

'Trafic (1971)' - with one 'f' - isn't about drugs, it's about cars. More specifically, it's about the chaos of car travel, the mishaps and hiccups that occur when driving a metal box from one location to another. With a more clear narrative drive than its predecessors, Mr. Hulot's final outing sees its clumsy main character accompany a camping car he's designed to a trade show in Amsterdam. The perpetually pleasant protagonist actually has a job this time, and he's dedicated to doing it as well as he possibly can - which, of course, isn't as well as his employers would like. This mildly amusing comedy isn't particularly funny, but it has a handful of humourous moments and it's generally pleasant. It ambles about amiably, and it somehow never comes close to being boring despite the fact that its slow pacing emphasises the gaps between its giggles. Its ambition is scaled back when compared to 'Playtime (1967)' and it lacks that superior picture's truly scrumptious production design, but it's more compelling - and chucklesome - than 'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)' and 'Mon Oncle (1958)'. It isn't brilliant, but it's enjoyable enough for what it is. It's a very specific sort of experience, one almost exclusive to its series. Personally, this type of film is hit or miss for me. Now I've seen all of Hulot's outings, I can safely say I actively enjoyed two of them. However, I can see how some people would enjoy them all, and to a much higher degree than I do. This final Hulot film is well-made, charming and fairly amusing. It's a bit of an odd coda to 'Playtime (1967)', which is considered a masterpiece by many, but it's a solid effort nevertheless.

This really is not unpleasant, and I smiled a good deal (when I wasnt bored); but an hour in I knew I wouldn't watch this again after this viewing most likely, which is not the case with Tati's other Hulot films that are pretty masterful on the whole (think like, say, going from A Night at the Opera to Room Service with the Marx brothers and you may catch my drift).

Tati is so into having little bits of business that the movie often forgets to have... gags. Or, that is not always fair, perhaps it thinks the little bits of behavior are enough to sustain it, but without things like relatable characters it feels aloof. And while the whole overall irony is that they actually don't get to the auto show in Amsterdam due to the mishaps and ballyhoo, I suspect there would have been some rich chances for more satisfying plants and payoffs, or quick visuals (Hulot in the half-car is a hoot), than what we get with the misadventures and long stays at the office (to show how the camping car works) and at the farmhouse.

The multi-car nose picking (but not one booger eaten, come on, France), the multi-car melee (especially that one car's hood flapping away) and Hulot getting stuck up in the tree upside down trying his damndest to fix the outside hedge fixture on the house are the highlights and are funny. And there are little bits of grace notes that made me laugh a bit, like when Hulot steps into the guys office, turns around and knocks, the man at the desk says to come in, then he leaves and talks to the man at the other desk he just passed (!) Or the moment where that one barking dog in the countryside house is just a big softee.

Dare I say, as admirable as the effort is, Tati (on a post Playtime high) is a little too satisfied with his own flights of fancy. I think the problem too is not that a filmmaker is engaged more with behavior than story or plot - what would cinema be without Altman or Cassavetes if that was the case - but the larger context and people in it need to matter for that behavior to take shape, and this features... a slightly bumbling but not more or less than usual Hulot, and that one American woman (director of ALTRA, she doesn't even have a name), who seems stuffy and not that sympathetic for much of the time. I know, I know: tragedy in close up and comedy in long shot and so on, but there are limits.

Ok, one more nice part: The images of the cars driving fast and the chaos of the last ten minutes set to Charles Dumont's burst of rock and roll.

Whilst not Tati's best by any stretch of the imagination the genius of the man still shines through. Having lived in France for a while I see more humour in this film, particularly in the comedic observation, than before. The French may be fanatical about cinema and may well have produced some of the world's greatest film makers but out and out comedy probably ranks well down in terms of output. Maybe it's something to do with the French sense of humour (whatever that may be). Unlike British, and to a lesser extent US comedy, self-parody is not a French strength. It could be something to do with their history and education but the culture, so strong in literature and the arts seems not to demean itself with pure laughter. Most cinema fans would probably be hard put to list 10 French comedies - other than perhaps drama with the occasional comic undertones. Les Visiteurs (the original not the recent re-make) is probably one of the better examples but here again there's little or no self-mocking.

So it was left to Tati to mine the seam - and how well he mined it. Here he takes the smallest of French (dare I say Parisian) mannerisms and extends them into lengthy scenes of beautifully observed comedy. Whether it's the windscreen wipers in tune with the occupants or the nose-picking drivers, he asks the French to at least smile, if not laugh out loud, at themselves.

Yes, the film does move at rather a slow pace and there are times when the comic observation sags, but the sight of dear old M Hulot in his mackintosh, loping along with pipe jutting from his mouth will ever remain one of cinema's delights.