Trafic (1971.)
After losing all his money on Playtime, Tati came up with this tale of a group from a car company trying to deliver their new vehicle – the camper car – to a car show in Amsterdam and getting held up by a series of comic mishaps. Except the mishaps are more prosaic than comic. Hulot is sidelined again and is barely a comic character here. If there is comedy character, it is the PR lady played by Maria Kimberly. Similarly this is a comic film with no real interest in being funny, jokes are set up and them left to float away.
There is little worse in comedy than having people act incomprehensibly or irrationally just to set up a gag. One thing worse than that though is having people act incomprehensibly or irrationally just to set up a gag and then not deliver the gag. At one point the van carrying the camper car prototype runs out of petrol and the film devotes five minutes to Hulot walking along the road with a petrol can, running across a field in pursuit of another man with a can and finding a petrol station in a village, filling up and then hitching a lift back to the van still stranded on the side of the motorway. Similalry there is a big pile up scene that is utterly contrived, comes out of nowhere and has no result.
It is a sour, grumpy vision. This time Tati seems to have some huff about the moon landings. He also continues to indulge his obsession with road markings, that began in Mon Oncle. Visually it's a very clear and orderly world, a simplified world which is beset by occasional small inconvenience. It is like watching a public information film which has neglected to include any information.
After losing all his money on Playtime, Tati came up with this tale of a group from a car company trying to deliver their new vehicle – the camper car – to a car show in Amsterdam and getting held up by a series of comic mishaps. Except the mishaps are more prosaic than comic. Hulot is sidelined again and is barely a comic character here. If there is comedy character, it is the PR lady played by Maria Kimberly. Similarly this is a comic film with no real interest in being funny, jokes are set up and them left to float away.
There is little worse in comedy than having people act incomprehensibly or irrationally just to set up a gag. One thing worse than that though is having people act incomprehensibly or irrationally just to set up a gag and then not deliver the gag. At one point the van carrying the camper car prototype runs out of petrol and the film devotes five minutes to Hulot walking along the road with a petrol can, running across a field in pursuit of another man with a can and finding a petrol station in a village, filling up and then hitching a lift back to the van still stranded on the side of the motorway. Similalry there is a big pile up scene that is utterly contrived, comes out of nowhere and has no result.
It is a sour, grumpy vision. This time Tati seems to have some huff about the moon landings. He also continues to indulge his obsession with road markings, that began in Mon Oncle. Visually it's a very clear and orderly world, a simplified world which is beset by occasional small inconvenience. It is like watching a public information film which has neglected to include any information.
