Soigne ton gauche

Not a great short, but worth watching for a glimpse of a very young Jacques Tati, and for an interesting look at a French rural village in 1936. Jacques Tati's mannerisms are funny, but underutilized. He could have gotten a lot more mileage out of some of the situations. I had one really big laugh, but the rest of the film was just pleasantly amusing. The editing is very crude. It kinda felt like the editor held up the strips of film in one hand and scissors in the other and eyeballed it. Either that, or there were some frames lost to decomposition or something. 7/10 is probably being a little too generous as far a pure entertainment value, but that's what I'm going to give it, because it's a fascinating piece of film history.

Wow, Tati was a young man. Here he plays someone's young son, 17 years before M. Hulot's Holiday. The action centers around a boxing match between a champ and Tati, who knows nothing about boxing and has to consult a manual during the fight. It sounds funnier than it really is. Chaplin's boxing match in City Lights is much, much better. The editing of this film can be confusing. Still, it is funny. It's worth a 7/10. See it on Criterion's M. Hulot's Holiday DVD, recently released.

"Soigne ton gauche" is a great surprise thanks to to artistic direction by René Clément, but I think you have to be french to appreciate in big laughs all the farm context and characters. As in "Gai dimanche", there are some early Tati's future gags and characters, like the postman François from "l'Ecole des facteurs" and "Jour de fête". In the 30's, Tati did a lot of music hall shows imitating funnily sportsmen, from tennis to boxing. Here Tati tries boxing as an amateur facing a brutal champion, he learns on the ring improvising from a book. This short has fast paced editing so gags are also very fast for spontaneous laughs.

A very young-looking Jacques Tati provides some good moments in this generally amusing early feature. The overall style of the comedy (which was directed by René Clément) is somewhat different from Tati's own, but with some hints in his character of things to come.

The simple story has Tati's character working on a farm when he meets a boxer who is in training nearby. The early parts are pleasant, if a little slow, but when Tati gets in the ring with the boxer, the pace starts to build up quickly, leading to a madcap climax. It makes fairly good use of the opportunities, and it is particularly funny to see Tati's character keep trying to refer to the boxing manual. It's a good gag, and not an easy one to pull off that smoothly.

No one would compare this with Tati's best features, but it is a solid comedy with some good laughs. If it had been a Hollywood short comedy of the mid- to late-1930s, it would probably have been a little above average.

Rene Clement as a comedy director? Yes indeed, because even as singular a talent as Clement had to direct something early on, and here he is, directing Jacques Tati as a farm hand working where a boxer is training, and all the sparring partners are unconscious. So when the trainer spots Tati shadow-boxing with himself, he tosses the young dope to the champ.

It doesn't look anything like what you'd expect a film from Clement to look like, and it doesn't look anything like what you'd expect a film with Tati to look like.... except for the young kids running around the farm, playing at being newsreel cameramen and shooting what looks interesting to them.... and which you need to think about for a few seconds before you realize that, yes, that makes sense..... and that makes it pretty much the earliest film by Tati in which his auctorial voice begins to be heard: a nostalgia for a world that never really existed, in which Hulot wanders happily across the shore, or leads a pack of wild dogs through the streets .... and that links to some of Clement's more singular works, like JEUX INTERDIT and LE MURA DI MALAPAGA. in which people long for a little compassion.

It's odd how two artists can explore the same themes in such different ways.... and how nobody notices when their paths cross.