JOUR DE FETE Movie Review

The Big Day
Holiday

In The Silent Clowns, his indispensable book about the golden era of silent comedy, Walter Kerr examines the phenomenal success of a few of the most famous figures from 1920s, including Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harry Langdon. But in examining their staying power, Kerr notes that Langdon, major star that he was, was a phenomenon of his time. While films of Keaton and Chaplin can get the same laughs now as they did 70 years ago, Langdon's comedy was more contemporary than classic—the cultural context of his gags existed in a limited time span, and the window has closed. France's Jacques Tati, whose work was strongly influenced by those comics, may have quietly succumbed in the last couple of decades to a fate similar to Langdon's. His first feature, the 1949 Jour de Fete, develops a character Tati created earlier in a short film: François the Postman. A bicycle-riding civil servant in a small French village, François (Tati) sees a documentary film at a local carnival on the high-speed, automated wizardry of the United States Postal Service. The light flashes on in François's head, and he sets about designing increasingly bizarre, charmingly Rube Goldberg—esque ways to bring the little town's mail delivery into the modern age. The result is chaos, built on a series of intricate, interlocking visual gags that place the earnest but bumbling François at the mercy of his own, unnecessarily complex solutions to a problem that never existed; no one in town is in a hurry to get mail. (One wonders what Tati's reaction would have been—had he not died in 1982—to the now nearly common phenomenon we Americans call “going postal.”) As in Tati's subsequent theatrical features (there were to be only four more), the world he envisions is an expansion of Chaplin's Modern Times. Tati warns us—through a strategy of slow, gradually escalating physical comedy—that the fast pace of modern life is a threat to humanity's more delicate sensibilities; furthermore, it's rude. The relative rarity of Tati retrospectives, and their sparse attendance when they do happen, may be bittersweet proof that his fears were well-founded. (Most video versions now contain the hand-colored sequences that Tati added in 1964.)

NEXT STOP … Modern Times, Mon Oncle, Playtime

1948 79m/B FR Jacques Tati, Guy Decomble, Paul Fankeur, Santa Relli; D: Jacques Tati; W: Henri Marquet, Jacques Tati; C: Jacques Mercanton; M: Jean Yatove. VHS, LV VDM, CRC, NLC