Despite having worked exclusively during the sound era, Jacques Tati was arguably the last of the great silent comedians. His signature character, Monsieur Hulot, occasionally mutters an audible phrase or two, and there’s always plenty of background chatter—Tati’s films are notable for their rich, complex soundtracks, which he painstakingly constructed in post-production. All the same, his style of gentle slapstick has much more in common with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd than with any other director or star of his own generation. He was far less prolific than those counterparts, however, which allows Criterion to offer a box set called The Complete Jacques Tati that can be held in the palm of one hand. Containing all six of his features and most of the shorts in which he appeared, it’s an invaluable one-stop tour of a singular career that spanned five decades (1934–1974) while remaining vaguely out of time.
After starring in a handful of comedy shorts directed by others (including René Clément, who’d go on to make such classics as Forbidden Games and Purple Noon) during the 1930s, Tati saw action in World War II, then established a successful cabaret act in Paris. When Clément was unavailable to direct a short script Tati had written about a school for postmen, Tati took the helm himself. Two years later, that short, “L’école Des Facteurs” (included in this box set), formed the basis for Tati’s glorious feature debut, Jour De Fête (1949). While Tati plays the most significant role—that of a small village’s bicycle postman, who sees a documentary on American postal methods and becomes obsessed with increasing his speed—the film, set on and just after the day of the town fair, functions more as an affectionate community portrait, frequently taking detours to observe people battling bothersome insects on the road or the go-nowhere flirtation between a married man and his comely young neighbor. It also establishes Tati as superb with gags and having a knack for creative repetition. The Hulot films are better known, but this is a gem.
Speaking of Hulot, he makes his debut in Tati’s second feature, 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, which was so hugely popular in France (and elsewhere) that Tati would continue playing the role for the rest of his career—save for a TV-movie in which he more or less plays himself. Immediately identifiable by his signature hat, overcoat, and ever-present pipe, Hulot is an amiable buffoon prone to accidental mishaps, and generally having no particular agenda. (Unlike Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Lloyd’s “Glasses” character, Hulot never pursues women; even stony-faced Keaton was more romantic.) Here, he shows up at a seaside resort for his summer holiday and engages in various tomfoolery, though Tati is still more interested in fashioning a group portrait than in hogging the spotlight as an actor. Lazy, rambling, and almost completely plotless, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday forgoes the frenetic highs of Jour De Fête in favor of lightly amusing running bits—many of them aural, like a swinging door that makes a plucked-bass noise every time it’s used. (That sound now accompanies the Tati estate’s animated logo.)
With 1958’s Mon Oncle, Tati begins pushing his penchant for stylization in a more aggressive direction. Most of the action is set at the ultra-modern, anti-functional home of Hulot’s sister and brother-in-law, whose young son views Hulot as a surrogate father figure. This is Tati’s first color film—he’d attempted to shoot Jour De Fête in color, and a restored alternate version of that film is included as a bonus feature—and the first in which outré art direction threatens to overshadow the characters. Most of the jokes are predicated on an exasperation with technology, which caused some French critics at the time to accuse Tati of being a Luddite. Mon Oncle’s bigger problem is that it’s far less generous than Tati’s other films, drawing a judgmental dividing line between the hero’s ramshackle life and that of his odious relations (excepting his nephew, who hates the regimentation and mechanization as much as Hulot does). Still, there are plenty of terrific jokes, and Hollywood didn’t sweat the swipe at leisure-era progress: The film won that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, thereby cementing Tati’s reputation.