The Delightful World of Jacques Tati: Cleaning Out My Criterion Closet

Hello!  This is the first in what will likely be a very occasional series where I take the opportunity to finally go through the various Criterion box sets I have sitting around.  Some of them I bought for myself in the middle of a series of “what does anything matter anyway” shopping sprees back in 2021.  A couple of them I believe were provided to me as a Christmas present.  One I think might have just appeared in my home one day?  Regardless of how they got here, I figured they would each eventually make for some good writin’ content.  At least here’s hoping.

Here we go with the first official entry of the “Cleaning Out My Criterion Closet” series: The Complete Jacques Tati!

(I’m open to suggestions on the series name.)

Let me start with this: I find Jacques Tati delightful.  

His work pushes a lot of my creative buttons, some of which I didn’t know I even had.  His movies are, to a one, lush and bright and colorful and playful, qualities that are always going to win points with me.  Also, I didn’t realize this about myself, but I find Tati’s specific style of quiet observational social satire to be very comforting and warm, especially since it manages to so often be eerily prescient.  On top of everything else, I find myself strangely fascinated with directors who managed to carve out their place in film history with a relatively brief filmography.  Although he has also starred in, written and directed a handful of shorts, Tati’s feature-length directorial count is just six (five, depending on how one wishes to categorize his last movie, 1974’s PARADE).

So, yes, when finally working my way through the Complete Jacques Tati box set I bought myself from Criterion almost three years ago, I found myself smiling often and delighted quite a bit.  Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Tati is a sneakily polarizing filmmaker, at least if the healthy sampling of various Letterboxd reviews, some from mutuals, are anything to go off of.

I should remind everybody that, of course, the Letterboxd app is the first, last and only source for objective truth in film criticism.  All joking aside, plenty of praise is still heaped on Jacques Tati anyway, even by those that don’t profess to get him, and nobody seems to really argue his credentials, either as a visual artist or as a film auteur.  

But a lot of people don’t think he’s all that funny.

It is the singular thing that I see holding people back from really embracing Tati’s filmography.  Going back to Letterboxd, one generally-positive review of MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY describes the humor of the film as hitting him “with all the comic force of a gentle breeze and the energy of an afternoon nap”.  A two-and-a-half review of JOUR DE FETE simply reads “it may be time for me to finally accept that tati is not for me”.

To be clear, there’s not a single thing wrong with feeling this way, and it doesn’t invalidate anybody’s film taste to do so; those two particular reviews come from folks whose writing and style of critique I genuinely love and aspire to one day live up to.  But I keep coming back to the question of why certain styles of humor hit with some people and others don’t.  It’s one of those grand questions of being alive to me, roughly equivalent to “Why are we here?” or “Why does God allow people to suffer?” or “Why does my headphone cord always manage to find the perfect corner or edge to get stuck on in order to suddenly yank me backwards?”  The question of how an individual's sense of humor works is ultimately unanswerable, but it feels like a query of vital importance regardless.

I’d be lying if I didn’t have this all in the back of my mind as I went through Tati’s films and shorts over the past couple of months, almost all of them for the first time.  Admittedly, there were periods where I sort of agreed with those who said his style doesn’t click for them.  Then again, there were moments when I couldn’t believe anybody could watch these movies without a big, fat, permanent smile on their faces the whole time.

As it turns out, Jacques Tati is more a state of mind than anything else, and adjusting to his style is half of the fun, the “aha” moment when you realize he is clicking for you.  And it is a singular, practically peerless style, one worth trying to break down to figure out…

….why is Jacques Tati funny for some, and not for others?

———

My first encounter with Tati was only a couple of years ago.

In December 2021, MON ONCLE was the weekly selection for the Arroyo Film Club, a…uh, film club I was (and am!) a member of.  I jumped into Tti’s third feature film relatively cold.  The only things I really knew about it were that a) it was critically acclaimed and b) it was part of a series of loosely connected movies by Jacques Tati starring a character named Monsieur Hulot.  Hulot had a signature look (gray trench coat, hat and a pipe of comical length) and was known for strolling through various social situations that often featured displays of new technology, in this case a modern “house of the future”.  Sounds fun!  I imagined something like Mr. Magoo, a movie filled with humorous set pieces with that old-fashioned “setup, complication, payoff” formula that made many frantic comedies of the 20th century so satisfying.  Imagine all the different contraptions inside that house he would have to tackle and wrangle!  

For those who have seen MON ONCLE, you know that it’s….not really that.  I mean, it’s not not that; it’s not that it doesn’t have good old-fashioned gags.  One of the biggest laughs in the movie is a scene where Hulot starts playing around with the kitchen glassware inside the home of his wealthy sister and brother-in-law.  His wonder and delight in a jug that bounces off the floor is quickly followed by his harsh discovery of a matching tumbler that….doesn’t.  And it is a movie that is mostly made up of comic setpieces that develop a joke all the way through to its logical conclusion; the rubber hose factory is proof enough of that.  It was just the light, patient way in which Tati did it all that threw me off.  His particular sense of humor turned out to be something way more subtle than I was used to.  

For one, it wasn’t a movie that was all that concerned with getting up close and personal with its characters; every shot felt just a little distant, almost literally observational, like I was watching something unfold across the street.  It sounds like nothing more than a simple style choice, but when you reflect back on your favorite comedies, most of them (if not all) rely on close-ups, all the better to accentuate and highlight a given joke, situation or punchline.  Reaction shots are an essential tool in a comedian’s belt.  Not for Tati.  He is much more interested in watching his jokes unfold from afar, almost by accident.  It takes some time to adjust to that!

For two, considering it’s a movie categorized as a “Monsieur Hulot” adventure, he didn’t seem to be the primary focus of MON ONCLE (especially surprising given that he is the titular oncle).  When he is, he’s not always the main driver of the action.  More often, things happen around him: the things he observes in the modern home of his sister and brother-in-law, the light mischief he allows his nephew to get away with, the ridiculous path he must take through his building in order to reach his room.  When things do happen, he barely seems bothered by them.  It was all a much more detached experience than I had ever expected from a bright and colorful French comedy from the 50’s created by a man with a background in clown and mime.  

I definitely liked it.  But as it became my turn to discuss it during the club’s meeting/Zoom session, I couldn’t focus on anything beyond MON ONCLE just…not being what I expected.  It was hard for me to evaluate it on its own terms just because what it was was so different to me.  I was expecting to go to a concert and watch a band play a big, bright march.  What I got was a light, but slightly high-tempo, waltz.

I suspect, and can only suspect, that this might be a similar barrier to entry for others trying to experience Tati for the first time.  It’s not really a question of his movies just being too damn smart for cretins to truly understand (god, do I hate those kinds of arguments), but it is a question of its style of humor being so singular that it’s hard to really process the first time around.  And if it was that discombobulating the first time, why would you go back for a second try?  Frankly, if the box set wasn’t already sitting there daring me to do something with it, I probably wouldn’t have dipped back in.  MON ONCLE wasn’t what I was initially expecting, which can only be processed as disappointment.

Guys and gals, I’m telling you, give Tati another try if you haven’t already.  Watching MON ONCLE a second time, it revealed itself to be a masterpiece.  Because once you can adjust to how he saw the world, his work is quite rich. I really hesitate to call his movies a “vibe” because, either positive or negative, aren’t all movies a “vibe”?  What exactly would a “non-vibe” movie be?  But his best work hits this great cross section of “pleasant” in terms of appearance and “prescient” in terms of content, and it’s genuinely difficult to identify any other movies quite like them.  

What else can you call that but a vibe?  

But like all vibes, they’re only valuable when you can feel them for yourself.  Without that, there’s not much else to hold onto.  But if you’ve watched a few Tatis and you just don’t find yourself loving them, take a little time and revisit.  I’m proof positive that it can make a difference.

After you do that, I recommend doing what I did and start working your way through his relatively brief filmography in order and seeing what emerges.  For me, I started realizing the style choices that once made MON ONCLE vaguely impenetrable to me are actually the precise elements that make him so damn delightful.

———

Something to keep in mind about Jacque Tati’s films is that they really are not the “belly laughs, roll on the floor in fits” kind of comedy, at least not to me in the present day.  Maybe its postwar French audience were in hysterics, but I guess we’ll never know, because they’re presumably all dead.

Regardless, people who complain that his style of humor is just too light to be taken in aren't exactly completely off base or anything.  The jokes on display are observational, almost detached, and Tati applies this method of comedy consistently throughout his filmography, especially the four Hulot films.  He casts himself as the presumably central character (either Hulot or, in 1949’s JOUR DE FETE, Francois the Postman), but then sort of wanders in and out of the narrative at will.  His movies are purposely constructed to feel loose even when, in actuality, they’re constructed with an obsessive eye for detail that made him one of the purest auteurs in all of film (it’s also what ended up cutting his directorial career short, but we’ll get there).  Nothing about his movies are forceful in any way; you are trusted to arrive at the conclusions he’s trying to draw you towards, but they don’t get mad at you if you don’t.

The idea of the detached oblivious protagonist can be found even from his first starring role, in a short entitled “Soigne Ton Gauche!” (Watch Your Left!).  There, he plays a farmer who gets the opportunity to be a boxer.  He takes it with such aplomb, and enters his own little world so quickly, that it seems to be lost on him that he’s very much in the process of getting his ass beat by the professional fighter he’s been set up to fail against.  His first Hulot feature, MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY*, is made with the same light touch, as the titular character makes his film debut attempting to relax at a seaside resort.  He makes his entrance in the main hall by innocently leaving the door open, allowing a gust of wind to hit his fellow vacationers; one man’s mustache begins to flap.

*MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY is perhaps the one Tati movie that would benefit from a rewatch for me.  I had a pleasant enough time with it, but compared to the next two Hulot movies, it didn’t move me as much.  I also opted for the original cut, which runs about 100 minutes.  I have to wonder if Tati knew what he was doing when he eventually went back in 1978 and recut it to a much tighter 86.  I guess I’ll let you know.

What Jacques Tati seemed to be the most preoccupied with in his art, and what doesn’t really start coming to focus until MON ONCLE, is the increasing reliance on technology into a no-longer-simple postwar world.  It’s never usually set up as a “man vs. machine” battle of wits; more often, we see people interact with new technologies or modern furnishings in order to evoke an ironic “isn’t this silly?” response.  Shots of a television broadcast playing video of Apollo 11 shooting into the stars juxtaposed against a car breaking down on a city freeway.  A dog accidentally triggers an automatic garage door sensor, locking the home owners inside.  Two steps forward, two steps back.  That sort of thing.    

As you might have noticed, the issue with some of his style and observations is that, frankly, they’re so dead-on and prophetic that they don’t even register as jokes in the twenty-first century.  My go-to example: one of the big signifiers of “modernity” at Villa Arpel in MON ONCLE is a garden filled with rocks and a garish (if admittedly playful) fish-shaped water sculpture.  Now, one quick walk around my neighborhood here will show the “front lawn filled with rocks” aesthetic is still a popular style choice, at least where I’m at in central California, and it looks just as odd in real life as it does in MON ONCLE.  

But that’s my point.  It’s not really a joke, now, is it?  A set dressing detail that would likely have seemed exaggerated in 1958 France now just seems like what a nice, modern house looks like in the here and now.  It’s not worth laughing at.  It’s the same as the camper car at the center of 1971’s TRAFIC, a vehicle that comes equipped with everything one needs to rough it in the great outdoors: a water line, a small table and accompanying chairs, a television set.  This is presented as absurd, but it now just seems like a prototype for your average RV.

To view it one way, it’s exactly why Tati’s movies are so thrilling.  His ruminations on our reliance on technology were extremely accurate!  But to view it another way, it’s why his movies can feel so light and so inconsequential.  

What I don’t think anybody can deny is how playful his movies are.  Sets that appear to be constructed one way suddenly collapse to reveal themselves.  Recurring jokes take on a slightly different rhythm, almost as if their creator is aware of you adjusting.  To visit Villa Arpel one more time, I’ll never forget the night-time scene where, as Hulot attempts to get through the gate, the house suddenly appears to have eyes.  Yes, it’s clearly two people in the window, their silhouettes serving as the pupils, but the way they follow Hulot around from afar….it’s simple magic.  How could you not be delighted?

Speaking of being playful, let’s talk a little PLAYTIME.

———

Jacques Tati’s fourth feature film PLAYTIME is probably his biggest feat and my personal favorite of his.  Naturally, it’s the movie that basically ruined him.

It’s a movie told more or less in two parts.  As per Tati norms, the plot is pretty simple, no more than a starting point; this time, Hulot must go into the city in order to attend a meeting.  The first part of PLAYTIME is Hulot’s arrival and introduction to “modern” Paris, a land of glass and concrete where seemingly every building is nothing more than a labored labyrinth built to disconnect its inhabitants.  What was most striking about this section of the film, especially coming off of MON ONCLE, one of the most lush and colorful movies I’ve ever seen, was watching Tati suddenly experiment with a monochromatic tone.  Although ever vibrant, his conception of Paris is one of metallic and uninviting grays.

If PLAYTIME sounds cynical, I’m not certain that’s the goal.  Its primary thesis, at least in the beginning, is that modern city life is divisive by its very nature, even as we all find ourselves crammed into the same space.  A moment I keep thinking about is an overhead shot of an office manager walking over to a cubicle in order to pick up a phone and call another worker sitting in another cubicle across the room.  Another moment is a striking sequence of a modern (and very upscale) apartment building, where everyone seems to be watching the same boxing match, but completely sequestered by thick walls.  They’re unified, yet separate  As usual, Tati doesn’t punctuate any of this.  He just holds the shot long enough for you to arrive at the point on your own, then moves along.

The second half of PLAYTIME, on the other hand, is maybe Tati at his very finest, something that could only be referred to as “the restaurant sequence”, if it’s indeed possible for a singular sequence to take up an hour of runtime.  We sit in a fancy, happening restaurant in Paris (The Royal Garden) just as it begins to open its doors to patrons.  As often happens, things don’t go according to plan.  Pushy diners want to change tables.  Dishes sell out.  Doors get destroyed.  The restaurant begins to run past capacity. 

It’s a thrilling sequence for a plethora of reasons, the first of which is the illusion of it occurring in real time.  It begins with the restaurant opening up for dinner service and its first early-bird diners coming in.  It ends with its drunken patrons stumbling out to the street just in time for the morning cock to crow.  In between, we watch as the internal traffic ebbs and flows, as characters we saw earlier mix and intertwine, as dishes run out, as glass gets destroyed, as drunkards get expelled only to return.  By the time it’s all over, you genuinely feel like you’ve been part of the waitstaff all night.

Second, if you thought Tati was going to hang out in a gray world for too long….bitch, you thought.  It’s not the Arpel house, but the set of The Royal Garden is so satisfying to look at and take in that you’d swear you’d want to live there (or at least take a date to).  It’s a beautiful piece of meticulous scenery, made all the more delightful when it’s revealed that pieces of it have been explicitly designed to get destroyed.

There’s just ... a music to the second half of PLAYTIME  Just like all great compositions, it sets its rhythm just long enough for you to get used to it, and then bam a tempo change occurs, or a sustained note you had previously forgotten was even still playing gets resolved.  As mentioned earlier, the glass front door shatters and breaks.  Shit, now what?  Later, after we have just enough time to forget about it entirely, the solution is revealed: the doorman holds the brass handle and continues to let people in and out as if the door was still functioning.  Play time, indeed.

PLAYTIME is perhaps not an intuitive movie; it was not a success upon its release, and it severely stifled Tati’s career.  Why didn’t it do better?  For starters, Hulot as a character is even more hands-off than in previous entries, which may have alienated audiences, both then and now.  Compared to MON ONCLE, Hulot seems to be a supporting character in his own movie.  He disappears for large stretches, the screen time deferred to an American tourist just as lost and in awe of Paris as Hulot himself.  This was an intentional choice, meant as a compromise between art and commerce; Tati had started to become bored of the Hulot character, yet his movies would lose a sellable angle without him.  Thus, PLAYTIME is designed to make Hulot mostly invisible.

Alternatively, PLAYTIME could maybe never have been successful enough to make back its money.  The shoot just went on for too long, and cost too much to have ever been viable.  The entire movie is essentially one big massive, multifaceted, tactile set (dubbed “Tativille”, which took half a year to construct alone, from September 1964 to March 1965).  To actually shoot the damn thing took them from April 1965 to October 1966 (!).  The money frequently ran out, with heavy reliance on government grants to get the project done.  Tati’s persistent, obsessive need for control over every detail of the world he constructed, the creative spark that makes his movies so unique, ended up being what wound his career down.

And yet.  The result is a movie that exists in a world you desperately want to explore.  Imagine if “Tativille” still existed?  You’re telling me you wouldn’t pluck down money for tickets to have your own playtime in there?  Imagine actually being able to hang out and eat and dance in The Royal Garden?  Tell me you don’t wish it still existed?  But it doesn’t, at least not in our world.  On the other hand, it can always be revisited through PLAYTIME.  And if nothing else, the movie should be commended for that, the living testament and masterpiece of one of the purest auteurs the medium ever bore witness to.  

Why am I waxing on about it so much?  Because I think it’s my favorite of his main six, the one that best exemplifies his unique form of genius.  Yet, I think it’s a difficult one to just jump into.  It’s not where I’d tell a novice to start their journey, but I would tell folks who watched it once and found themselves on the outside of it to give it another try.

Tati’s filmography does feel like it fizzles out a tad after PLAYTIME.  His follow-up feature, 1971’s TRAFIC, is fine and full of imagination, and I admit to being pretty excited when it first began (Tati taking on commuting?  Let’s fucking go!), but it feels like a movie whose air has been taken out of it.  The main comic point is seen (as man starts to aim ever more towards space and stars, it’s never been more difficult to navigate the pathways here on Earth), but there’s an unusual lack of focus to it that made it meander a little too much for me.  Perhaps on that magic rewatch, I’ll find my way in.

Then there’s 1974’s PARADE, a movie that seems to have split sentiments amongst cinephiles, as well as Tati fans.  Although it’s included in the Criterion box set as his sixth and final feature, some people don’t seem to include it in the official count, referring to TRAFIC as his final movie.  It’s an understandable argument.  PARADE is a non-narrative feature, shot on video and made for television, that documents a performance of Tati’s circus troupe.  I’d hesitate to call it a strict documentary; there are too many small flourishes to call it an objective observation (besides the closing shot of children picking up the show’s instruments and beginning to perform magic themselves, there’s a lot of audience interaction and interruptions throughout the movie that smell of predetermined set-up, unless Dutch audience members really get down like that).  Regardless, it really is mostly just a series of short segments.  There’s some miming, there’s a lot of juggling and acrobatics, there’s some singing, there’s, like, a psychedelic rock performance?

And, look, at a distance, I didn’t really dig PARADE either.  Even at ninety minutes, it’s a little too long for what it is, and feels too much like a lost PBS program from the 70’s, the kind of thing that might have been rerun during the early days of Nickelodeon.  One wonders if paring it down to its best forty-five minutes and keeping it within the confines of a TV feature might have done wonders to endear it to its audience.  Were I to watch it out of context (I cannot imagine what someone would make of this were this the only Tati they’d ever seen), I don’t think I would have gotten it at all.  It feels too out of place, too un-indicative of what made Tati’s masterpieces so endearing.

But…I can’t fully dismiss PARADE, either.  Maybe it was the opportunity to see Tati’s amazing physicality on full display, even at a more advanced age, in a way he didn’t get to do as much as Hulot.  Maybe it’s because I had watched his earlier shorts where he played around like this a little more.  Maybe it was the accidental bittersweet nature of realizing his Hulot quadrilogy was truly bookended by movies and shorts that allowed him to be a clown.

All I know is, despite everything, by the end of PARADE, I was still sitting there with a smile on my face, still delighted, even in a much lesser work.

What can I say?  That’s the power of Jacques Tati.  Even at his worst, you can’t help but smile.