006 - Jour de Fete, 1949, France; Dir. Jacques Tati.

006 - Friday, January 6, 2017

Jour de Fete, 1949, France.  Dir. Jacques Tati.

Quickly!  Name a slapstick comedian.

Go.

Whom did you name?

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd?  The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges?  Don Knotts, Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen?  John Ritter, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Jim Carey?

Whom did you name that is not in this list?

Did you list Jacques Tati?

Who?

Jacques Tati!

If you like physical comedy, you will enjoy him.  Stumbling, bumbling, tripping, falling, running into things, inadvertently causing mayhem.  Or letting others do it.

That plus building and choreographing entire cities for a good sight gag (or site gag!).

Jacques Tati came out of the music halls.  That would be the European equivalent of our Vaudeville.

He performed nights before live audiences, miming, clowning, doing magic, bumping into things, and falling down.  Growing up he had played tennis and ridden horses, so he had in his act various gags where he mimed playing tennis and riding horses.  People believed they were seeing him as the tennis player, the racquet, the tennis ball, and the other player, or as both the rider and the horse.  One critic called him the human centaur--both man and horse.

His dad was a framer.  Not a house framer but a picture framer.  That's nice, you might think.  Sounds like a solid working-man's job.  Yes, but what if it means you are friends with Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec and other great artists?  We are going to see a pattern this year as we go through the films of filmmakers who grew up exposed to great art, and in some cases, who grew up as friends or family with great artists.

Jour de Fete begins with a horse and wagon riding down the road with carousel horses facing out the back.  The carnival is coming to town!  They pass a pasture and the real horses are spooked by the carousel horses.  This simple juxtaposition makes us smile and prepares us for the many clever observations M. Tati will be sharing with us in this and the next few films.  A boy skips up the trail and follows the wagon into town, and in that moment of youthfully innocent joy we enter into a world of playfulness.

Jacques Tati plays the mailman Francois.  He is clueless, so members of the village make sport of him.  Roger, played by Guy Decomble, gets him to drink in order to enhance Francois's ineptness.

Remember the name Guy Decomble.  We are going to see him again in the following films: La Bete Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938), Bob Le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956), The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959), and Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959).  Decomble is one of those faces that, whenever he pops up in a picture you point and say, "Hey, I know that guy!  What was he in?"  Well, here is your list of what he was in.

And how wonderful for him to work with all of these great directors.  By the end of this year, you will get to know and love these directors.

Eventually, Francois sees a "documentary" film in a tent which presents the efficiency of the United States Postal Service, and he decides that he wants to bring such postal efficiency to France.  So he embarks on his bike and begins to ride.

The scenes that follow are funny.  Take an accident-prone man on a bicycle, give him a new obsession, add speed, and see what follows.

And here is something you will enjoy about this movie.  Jacques Tati filmed in it both black-and-white and in color!  He placed two cameras side by side and filmed with them at the same time.  Both versions come on the disc, so you may watch them one after the other.  When you get to the color version, you are not watching a black-and-white movie that has been colorized, but you are watching a color movie that was made at the same time as the black-and-white movie.  Imagine if in addition to seeing the color changing, you also see the framing change.  Imagine watching the same movie twice, with the two versions being slightly offset.  I told you he was a framer.

Tati did this because, while he wanted to make a color film, he did not know if it would work out.  So he filmed the black-and-white version as a back-up.  Good thing for him.  The color version did not work out, at the time, so he released the black-and-white version, and it remained that way for decades until technology caught up and his daughter got the color version processed and released in the 1990s.

We are about to go on a fun journey with Jacques Tati.

Try not to fall.

https://www.criterion.com/films/28114-jour-de-fete