M. Hulot's Holiday

City Paper Grade: A

by Sam Adams

TOURIST TRAP: Gallic jester Jacques Tati directed and starred in M. Hulot's Holiday.

[City Paper Grade: A ]

The Great French clown Jacques Tati was parsimonious with his masterpieces, an exacting perfectionist who directed only five features and a handful of shorts in a 40-plus-year career. (The hard-up may also count Parade, essentially a filmed live show that returns Tati to his vaudeville roots.) But that handful of films is mother-lode rich in superbly constructed gags. Like Buster Keaton's, Tati's vision encompasses not just his protagonist, the affably bumbling Monsieur Hulot, but the universe around him, which bends itself to shield the feckless Hulot from harm.

M. Hulot's Holiday, made in 1953, is relatively modest compared to the films that followed, but that modesty is part of its elegant charms. Scrawny, towering Hulot arrives at a seaside resort packed with international travelers, and proceeds to gently wreak havoc, upending its orderly propriety but leaving only bliss in his wake. He is known everywhere he goes, which is less a matter of past history (he seems to have none) than of his archetypal profile. Even those he has never met seem to recognize him instantly, which applies as well to viewers who have never had the pleasure of his onscreen company.

Tati turned to film after the end of the silent era, but his movies hark back to the universality of silent cinema, when Chaplin's tramp could, with an exchange of intertitles, be reconstituted as a citizen of any nation on Earth. In Tati's film, the vacationers' polyglot babble comprises a kind of universal non-language. Some prints — the Ritz's is a new one, struck from a recent restoration — have fleeting subtitles, but there is nothing said that cannot be more richly understood through the study of interpersonal physics.

Tati's later films grew more and more despondent about the dehumanizing state of the modern world, but Holiday's fond nostalgia is unadulterated by social critique. Tati's ambitions grew to a ruinous extent, and audiences turned from his attack on their way of life. But their love for Hulot's idealized past never dimmed, nor has its power to enchant and transport.