Carrossel da Esperança

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.

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.

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.

A wholly enjoyable film, in which dialogue is incidental to the visual effect. I preferred black and white over colorized, and the French version over the slightly edited US version (with subtitles and the addition of an annoying artist who participates in colorizing). The real joy is watching Tati. Underneath all the great gags stirs the soul of the postman: officious, determined, mulelike. All expressed without words by a mustachioed rail of a man poised delicately on a bicycle. I was glad to see in the credits that La Poste had sponsored the restoration of the film. A French national treasure.