Jour de fête

At a small village fair, the postman François is watching a documentary movie on American postmen: they use helicopters, airplanes and parachutes to deliver mail, for a rapidity question. Rapidity, haste: that's what's in François's mind now. He wants to deliver mail as faster as he can into the small communities he crosses everyday…

This film has surely got an easy-going atmosphere; the gags succeed and are never totally alike. The mosquito each time comes back when you don't expect it. François riding his bike always finds something different to get you laughing! If you are French, then you'll understand villagers' peasant accent, and you won't miss to giggle! Some gags may remember you Charles Chaplin's ones, except that Jacques Tati used speech and colors, but dialogs almost escape notice, and colors aren't shocking.

I recommend this one to Chaplin's fans and other film-lovers.

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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«Jour de fête» is a very funny movie about François (played by Jacques Tati himself), the local postman who want to be as fast as the postmen in America. The camera work is excellent so is the cinematography. Very joyful movie too. The music score is great and it's a good way to show «l'ambiance de fête» that lives in the village.

I really enjoyed that movie. The only little drawback, and it's not really one, it's the regional french dialect used in this movie. I'm french-speaking and even I had some difficulty to understand some of Tati's lines.

8 out of 10.

This movie will undoubtedly not be what you expect. The cover-art of Tati DVDs paints him as a Chaplinesque figure, but he's much gentler than Charlie. Charlie was energetic. You'll enjoy Tati's films if you expect a gentle trip to a beautiful little village. Throughout the film you observe more than get really involved. Tati always keeps you at a distance, like a stranger.

I liked Mon Oncle the best first run through, but by that stage it was the fourth of Tati's major four pictures I'd seen, so that must have coloured my impression. The most famous is Les Vacances de M. Hulot, and M. Hulot is Tati's famous character, who appears in Mon Oncle, Les Vacances and Playtime. He doesn't appear in Jour de Fete, which was Tati's first first feature-length.

Tati is the Antonioni of slapstick comedy. There's plenty to look at in his movies, as long as you stop waiting for a narrative. None of them have real stories. They do progress, but its more the visual motifs of the various townspeople that develop throughout.

Of the four I'd say Playtime is the least friendly to first-timers.

All copies of Jour de Fete since 1995 feature the imperfect colour process it was filmed with. Its not colourised, that's just the best colour method that Tati had at his disposal in 1949 in France. Even after restoration it suffers from over-brightening and unevenness in colour, and the overall impression is of a bad colourisation, so just be ready for that, and remember this colour version wasn't available until 1995, before that there was no colour, and I think the colour's an important part of the experience of Tati's fete.

I'd recommend you rent/borrow before buying any Tati, so you know what you're getting. Probably youtube won't be the best place: any small segment of his films won't make sense on its own, they're quite slow-paced, and the characters and scenes are meant to accumulate, not be excerpted.

Happy hunting.

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.