THE MOMENT HE appears on the screen, audiences begin to smile. Tall and skinny, constantly leaning with an inquisitive nose into a non-existent wind, he moves with a bouncing, loping stride while leaving unwitting chaos in his wake.
Monsieur Hulot was Jacques Tati’s most famous creation. This gangly near-silent figure in a smashed hat and crumpled raincoat, a bemused spectator and incompetent participant in the rituals of daily life, invited people to laugh wryly at the technological chaos they had created for themselves. Compared to most contemporary comedies, Tati’s humour is what Cole Porter’s music is to heavy metal: gossamer delicate, warmly sophisticated, intricately constructed, yet seemingly effortless.
Behind the camera, though, Tati was a painstaking craftsman. In a career spanning three decades, he produced only six features. They are now included in a retrospective at the National Film Theatre, as well as cinema releases for his first feature-length appearance, as a bumbling postman in Jour de Fête (1947), and for one of his best-loved films, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.
Holiday (1952) introduces our mild-mannered bumbler relaxing at the seaside. As in all of Tati’s films, there’s no centre of attention but lots of action on the periphery: a horse kicks in the rumble seat of a dandy’s car; a hotel door creaks persistently. Yet beneath the slapstick runs a strain of melancholy.
In Mon Oncle (1958), Hulot’s sister lives in a gadget-strewn suburban chateau with a sterile garden whose centrepiece, a fish-shaped fountain, frequently malfunctions. Towards the end, Hulot uses the electric lighter of a monstrously stylish automobile to fire his pipe. He then absent-mindedly tosses the lighter out the window, signalling Tati’s ambivalence towards making a truce with technology.
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The Oscar-winning Mon Oncle functions as a link between the seaside charm of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (pictured) and the full-scale futurism of Playtime (1967), in which there’s little sign of the old Paris we associate with Hulot. Tati took six months to build a suburb of glass towers, escalators, neon signs and nightclubs. No aspect of contemporary life escapes unscathed here, from the inanities of tourism and leisure to the dehumanisation of labour and the decay of privacy.
Yet Tati never had a political agenda. Born in 1908 in Paris as Jacques Tatischeff, a distant descendant of Russian nobility, he began his career as a music-hall mime before turning to cinema. Throughout his life he never joined a movement, artistic or political (and did nothing to distance himself from France’s oppressors during the Nazi occupation).
Yet he became a hero for modernists and culture-leaders. He befriended Marguérite Duras. Fellini wooed him to play Don Quixote. François Truffaut compiled his 1955 Cahiers du Cinéma list of establishment French film-makers, in which Tati was only one of nine heroes among 80 villains.
As David Bellos’s biography Jacques Tati (Harvill) argues, he was deconstructing cinema before Truffaut, Godard and the other New Wave young guns did. Tati invented new ways of presenting sound, image and continuity that challenged the viewer to seek the telling detail in the frame.
His meticulously executed sight gags also drew comparisons with Buster Keaton. His befuddlement in the face of modernisation was seen as Chaplinesque, but Tati disagreed: “Chaplin is a gagman. He invents a gag and does it in front of the public. Hulot is not a gagman. He is not even an actor. I invented him because I wanted to find a man who’d be simple and honest and also a little bit out of control.”
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But Tati couldn’t find the momentum to sustain the Tatimania begun by Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. By the 1970s it had fizzled out and the cost of the sets for Playtime had ruined him. He spent his final years, before his death in 1982, trying to keep financially buoyant with adverts and catchpenny projects (Traffic, Parade).
Disgruntled, he requested that his dead body be stuffed in a bin-liner and put out with the rubbish. Tati, it seems, had never thought much of himself. Hulot, you imagine, would have simply shrugged, sucked on his pipe and, with a stiff-legged walk, moved on.