Parade

Tati's last movie plays in and around a circus performance. You get to see the acts, good and bad, the artists behind the scenes and the audience, from entering the arena to the audience reactions.

Two things strike you:

The artists are always creating and doing things. They are painting, acting, playing, juggling, whether on stage or behind the scenes. They never stop being creative. Tati shortens the creative process and mainly focuses on what is perceived by the artists and the audience/at the intersection. Sometimes, the acts of the artists will clash with each other, sometimes they are complimentary. Some acts are good, some misfire.

This is where the audience really comes in. Watch the audience reactions. Tati has set the scene from the beginning, showing you the cross section of the typical audience attending, making fun of some signs of the time and contrasting it against ... well, have a look at what is placed in the audience section; Tati leaves some hints as to what he thinks of those attending the show/art parade - critique is mixed with compliments and acceptance. The audience (a nice selection) will become involved in the creation of the art - in fact it appears impossible to separate the artists from the audience at times. The audience reactions are also telling - Tati shows us typical audience behavior from overbearing enjoyment to boredom. The placement of these reactions is very deliberate - there is a lot to pick up on and I suggest to view the movie a few times, focusing on different aspects of it.

Typical for a Tati movie there is some whimsy and the humour sways between slapstick and subtle satire. It is telling that Tati attempts to show a cross section of modern (for the times) and old fashioned especially in the music. In this he embraces both old and new. The film ends in a scene that shows that creativity and art leads to inspiration, where it counts and where it is allowed to grow.

Don't watch this as a circus movie; watch this as an art process and suddenly you will see a plot in the movie that is otherwise very easy to miss. This movie is Tati's final statement about art; it is not his most accessible movie and will probably only appeal to you, if you are willing to watch the movie a few times and spend some time thinking about it in between. So, not recommended for casual viewing.

This is a collection of circus acts with a fair bit of Tati's miming thrown in for good measure.

It's not a BAD film. Some memorable sequences include Tati miming a tennis game (in slow motion!) and traffic cops around the world. I don't think the M. Hulot character let Tati really stretch out and MIME. He is very very good.

The other performers and comedians, while not as famous as Tati, are still pretty good.

The main problem is that the premise is so basic. You can't really GO very far with this and Tati doesn't. It's basically just like watching a circus on TV. There's nothing to really glue the whole picture together.

I agree with the reviewer that found the audiences 70's clothing interesting in itself.

PARADE is basically the presentation of a circus performance, in which artistes interact with the audience in a series of set pieces - juggling acts, tightrope walks, clowning, balloon fights, plus one or two routines in which Tati demonstrates his remarkable talent for mime. The film's artificialities are evident: we see cardboard cutouts of members of the audience among live-action actors, while the performers sometimes talk to inanimate objects. Tati's purpose, although not overtly stated, seems to be to show how life is like a circus, with all of us indulging in a series of ritualized actions which, although meaningful in themselves, can also be considered absurd. This is definitely true of some of his set-pieces - for example the very funny routine where he imitates a boxer going into a championship bout. However, a series of routines do not necessarily make for an entertaining film: some of the performances involving actors other than Tati are distinctly second- rate, while the audience - when Tati's camera shows them in close-up - sometimes look thoroughly bored with the proceedings, despite the enthusiastic applause on the soundtrack. Judged by his previous oeuvre, PARADE is sadly a very second-rate piece: one feels sad that the great director could not have bowed out on a more positive note.

Jacques Tati's swansong is an affectionate return to roots, recreating some of the vaudeville routines of his past on stage at a Swedish circus, in a short program originally made for Scandinavian TV. Tati himself, serving as ringmaster for the troupe of acrobats and clowns, puts his aging but still limber body on display during a transitional set of solo pantomime turns. The show is frequently hilarious (some of the audience interaction with the performers is clearly not unscripted), but as a farewell effort of a comic genius responsible for some of the biggest laughs since the glory days of silent film comedy it can certainly come as an anti-climax. And because the stage show was 'filmed' using a crude early video process, it almost resembles a bootleg live rehearsal for the next, never made Tati feature.

This feels like a combination of Jacques Tati's sense of humor, an experiment from Ingmar Bergman, and the storytelling format of Federico Fellini. When Roger Ebert reviewed the film he called it a doodle, and I think that's a very good way to distill Tati's final effort, made for Swedish television. Effectively a variety show, it's a series of disconnected comedic bits and ideas without much of an anchor to it. There are fun bits throughout, but without any sort of throughline with a story of some kind, it becomes a mere balancing act between those that are good that get countered by those that aren't so good. It's a mixed bag. It's a doodle.

An audience arrives at a theater, a circus, and they filter into their seats. They are met by their master of ceremonies (Tati) who announces that the audience will be part of the show as well before going into a couple of mime routines around sports (tennis and boxing) that demonstrate Tati's wonderful physical abilities. Trained as a mime decades prior, he makes good on the promise of one man boxing against a phantom opponent. His bits are probably the highlight of the film. They're the kind of delightful comedy that defined his earlier films, and they often feel like Tati simply making it up as he goes along (though I imagine them to be highly practiced and precisely choreographed).

The rest of the bits have some charm, the best of them probably being the duel between a magician and a workman who just wanders onto the stage from his workspace off to the side (half-lit because we're supposed to see them there as part of the show). The magician does some simple sleight of hand that the workman shows him up by doing similar, but more spectacular, things. It all ends with someone from the audience doing a trick with a cane and a handkerchief that is better than the rest, followed by a girl popping out of a box unexpectedly and the workman messing up the disappearance of a microwave in comedic fashion.

There's an extended bit with a mule where members of the audience try to ride it, all failing, until a little boy offers the mule a treat after which the mule lets him on. It's an overextended bit that's never really funny and an ending that's not really all that much more than thinly sweet. There's a juggling bit where three workmen juggle large brushes in a variety of ways (including the three standing atop each other's shoulders) that's fairly impressive. There's a running gag of a group of physical performers in different costumes, depending on the larger bit around them (marching band, rock band, orchestra) that always end up with them vaulting over the piano which is actually a flat pommel horse and trampoline. It's amusing the first time and less so every other time.

I hope I've painted the disarray of sights and sounds that is the show. There are bits that are funny. There are bits that are not. In and out of it walks Tati, miming a man riding a horse or showing what traffic police are like from different countries (probably his funniest moment). As a variety show, it's intermittently amusing. I think there's supposed to be something in the end about clowning getting people, in particular children, getting interested in the arts because two children that had been highlighted throughout the film end up walking onto the now empty stage and playing with the paint and hammers and balloons left around. It's an idea, not much of one, but it's still there.

There's honestly not much to say about the film because there's not much there outside the surface. It feels like a relatively cheap way for Tati to have one more effort at a film, adapting some of his stage work into a television special for another country. Filmed on video (and looking not all that great for it), except for a handful of shots filmed on 16mm, Tati's final feature length film is an intermittent entertainment that is the roughest form of his humor without the long, hard effort to hammering it into something much smoother and cohesive. It's worth a few chuckles.