010 - Trafic, 1971, France; Dir. Jacques Tati.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

010 - Trafic, 1971, France.  Dir. Jacques Tati.

Have you ever read Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse?

What I hear people say most often about it is, "When are they ever going to get to the lighthouse?"

Throughout the novel they try to make it there.  They keep delaying.  By the end of the novel, ten years later, they finally set out for the lighthouse.  Meanwhile, Lily completes her painting and feels content.

Jacques Tati's movie Trafic could be called To the Car Show.  When are they ever going to get there?  Only instead of philosophical musings they have physical bumblings along the way.

In some ways Trafic is my favorite Jacques Tati movie.  Yes, PlayTime is bigger, longer, more brilliant, and with more set pieces and sight gags.  And the sequence in the restaurant The Royal Garden is fantastic.  PlayTime is a tour de force.  But Trafic has a story.  And characters.  And something else I will tell you about in a minute.

Did I just say a Jacques Tati movie has a story?

Imagine that.  A beginning, middle, and end.

Of course in some ways they all do.

In Jour de Fete the carnival comes to town.  Funny things happen to the postman.  He sees a movie that inspires him, which makes him more bumbling, and more funny things happen to him.

In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, he goes to the beach.  Funny things happen.  He goes home.

In Mon Oncle, M. Hulot looks out for his nephew while M. and Mme. Arpel try to impress people with their futuristic, plastic house.  Funny things happen.

In PlayTime, some American women come to Paris.  Funny things happen.  They go home.

In Trafic, they try to make it to the car show.  Funny things happen.  They arrive too late.

Yes, this is all terribly reductive.  Tati is a brilliant filmmaker who fills his work with nuanced observations and poignant commentary.  All his films are imaginative and clever and thoughtful, and they deepen with repeated viewing.  The more you watch them, the smarter he is.  Each time you see a Tati movie, you notice gags you had not seen before, and you marvel at his wit.

But Trafic for me takes on the quality of a fable.

Have you ever read John Steinbeck's The Pearl?  How about Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?

Somebody spends the entire story getting something only to lose it in the end.

Trafic is not so serious, and it has a happy ending, but it has that same deterministic feel about it that they are simply not going to make it to the car show no matter what they do, as though the powers of fate itself are now involved.  But though they do not get what they aim for, they get something else in the end.

Chaplin's Modern Times begins with The Tramp working at an imaginary factory, making widgets, all very fictional and all designed to provide Chaplin with his sight gags.  Tati's film Trafic also begins at a factory, but a real one, where they are mass-producing cars on an assembly line.

Trafic's lighthouse is an automobile show in Amsterdam.  Our man M. Hulot has designed a state-of-the-art entry, the futuristic Camping Car.

M. Hulot works for ALTRA, designing cars.  ALTRA puts his Camping Car into their truck to take it to the car show.  Hulot goes in the truck with its driver.  Everything that could go wrong does.

First, the truck will not start.  The truck driver finally starts it by placing a crank in the radiator and turning it the way you have seen antique cars started on television.  Then, the truck has a flat tire.  Then, the truck runs out of gas.  Then, something goes wrong with the clutch.  Then, the police take them in because their papers are not in order.  Then, the truck crashes into a red Volkswagen and causes a multi-car pile-up.  Then, they spend the night at a mechanic's house who can fix the wrecked truck.

Will we ever make it to the car show?

M. Hulot, the truck driver, and their publicist, a woman named Maria (who drives alongside them in a bright yellow roadster), share their adventures together as they try to make it to the car show.

Maria is a fully developed character.  She is the publicist for ALTRA.  She speaks French; she speaks English.  She drives a roadster; she has a dog.  She is pretty; she is a working professional.  She is aggressive; she is funny.  We see her barging in on a pair of operators and grabbing their telephone so that she can make a phone call.  We see her rebuffing the advances of a Dutchman, in English.  We see her hanging out with M. Hulot, the truck driver, and the mechanic like one of the guys.  We see her loving her dog.  This is an oasis in a Tati movie--a fully developed, fully human, character.

The longest set piece takes place at the second mechanic's place, in Holland.  They spend the night at an old BP gas station with a garage.  The driver stays in the garage.  Maria sleeps in a houseboat on the canal across the street.  The mechanic stays in his house with his wife.

As with all Jacques Tati movies, funny things happen.  Visual puns.  Gadgets.  Physical comedy.  The pacing is easy.  The tone is sweet.  The film belies a hint of underlying cynicism.

The Camping Car itself is well designed, and an entire set piece is devoted to opening all of its gadgets and accessories.  When the police impound it, they require the gang to open everything and demonstrate it.  There is a table and chairs, a coffee heater, cigarette lighter, soap, a barbecue grill, a shower, a tent, hot water, etc.  It is an impressive display of creativity even after half a century of development in RV technology.  Tati would have made for a clever engineer at the Winnebago corporation.

There is a moment in Trafic that struck me as unique in cinema.  I do not recall ever having seen it in a film before.

While the gang is at the mechanic's place, waiting for him to fix their truck, the television is on inside, and they are watching the moon landing.

Everyone is rounded up to come inside and see.  The atmosphere grows quiet, reverent.  We are outside, looking through the window, looking at the television through the window inside the room, watching the American astronaut walking on the moon.  We see the real footage.  We hear the real audio.  They, and we, are in awe.  Someone speaks a single word.

"Unbelievable."

In all of his work, Tati has been commenting on the tensions between technology and humanity.  He has portrayed technology as a threat to human relations.  And yet here, in this moment, man at his most technological is at his most human.  It is not scripted.  It is not fiction.  It is real.  A human being is walking on the moon.  At his technological peak man has found the holy.  The film stops.  And watches.  And reflects.

So do we.

Now here is the other thing about the film I said I would bring up in a minute.

Romance.

If you have seen Charlie Chaplin, you know that he was an unabashed romantic.  In each of his films his character The Tramp is in love.  He spends the entire film trying to win the girl's heart.  He is genuine, sincere, and kind.  Yet he is unnoticed and often fails--until the end when he finally wins her.  It tugs at the heartstrings.  You cheer for him.  You want him to win.  And with his films Chaplin left the legacy of the Hollywood ending we discussed yesterday.  The fairy tale.

People may feign to criticize the Hollywood ending, but it is what they want.  And it is why it works.  The movies are a place of make believe.  Dreams.  Longing.  Possibility.  Imagination.

Why can't life be happy?  What if it were?  Let us create that world.  And live in it.

It is more than merely holding up a mirror to nature.  It is holding up a magic mirror.

In all of Tati's films, M. Hulot has been single--polite, gracious, innocent, and sexless.  In Mon Oncle, a girl flirted with him but he never noticed her.  In PlayTime he started to hint at something more.  He buys a gift for one of the American tourist girls, but he never talks to her, and he has to send the gift through another person.  She opens it on the bus in the round-about and is touched, but she will never see him again.  It is sweet, and it is passing.

But here in Trafic something more happens.  In Trafic, M. Hulot and Maria have spent the entire film together, but as business associates with no hint of anything between them.  When they arrive at the car show to find that it is over, they leave together.  They say goodbye.  He opens his black umbrella.  He goes down the steps to the subway.

But suddenly, as if fate itself is moving the other direction, a crowd of people, all carrying black umbrellas, come out of the subway and march him back up the steps with them.  Which one is he?  Which is his umbrella?  It is a funny moment.

It also hints at a popular film that had come out in France a few years before--The Umbrellas of Cherbourg--a musical in which they sing throughout, not songs but the entire script!, a movie that made a star of Catherine Deneuve, a film known for its iconic overhead shot of multiple multi-colored umbrellas.

Here the umbrellas are all black, and they multiply as Hulot comes back up the steps, out of the subway, and back to Maria.  The two enter the parking lot together and into the mass of humanity, in straight lines and right angles, blending in so that we no longer know which ones they are, everyone looking for his car.

At the end of Modern Times, Charlot and the girl walk off into the sunset.

At the end of Trafic, Hulot and the girl walk off into the rain.

And Hulot leaves cinema forever.  No longer single but with someone.

And they all live happily ever after.