Film festivals are of course the place to see the newest releases, but they also give the opportunity to see old films that are rarely shown on the big screen. The London Comedy Film Festival yesterday showed Trafic (not Traffic, that’s a very different film) at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington. This 1971 film is hard to find, This DVD is currently unavailable to order often showing when trying to buy it online.
As a Monsieur Hulot fan I once drove miles to see the amusing Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot at a cinema, so never having seen Trafic I was one of the first into the Institute Francais to see the last film starring the awkward, pipe-smoking character created by Jaques Tati. Monsieur Hulot’s first outing came in 1953 when he holidayed in a small French hotel, though the character owes something to the postman in Tati’s 1949 Jour de Fete.
As well as being part of the film festival Trafic was also showing as part of the Cine Lumiere’s Cine Salon classics, and benefited from an excellent scene-setting introduction by Nick Walker. There was also a post-viewing discussion, where Nick told us that Tati had not intended the film to be a Hulot vehicle, but had been forced to use the character in order to raise the finance. This makes perfect sense as the film does not feel like a Hulot film. Hulot appears, with his pipe and awkward gait, but his is a bit part, a rehash, only one of several characters and his adventures do not drive the story.
Hulot films are not watched for their great plotting, but Trafic has a particularly sparse storyline. It won’t take many words to outline. Hulot is a designer at a car company. He accompanies his latest creation to a car show in Holland. That’s about it. Of course the earlier Les Vacances is not being libelled when summarised as a man goes on holiday, but though the plot is also simple, Les Vacances is much funnier. In the earlier film the comic events follow directly from Hulot’s character and inability to cope with modern life and other people. He is the politest of cavaliers, always offering to help and though he often gets the wrong end of the stick, it is usually in a plausible manner. His escapade in a folding canoe is absurd, yet importantly, possible, especially for a man as inept as Monsieur H. In Trafic the character is much less developed with too many of the comic moments feeling forced and lacking internal logic. Some have dated as attitudes change – when he tries to change a tyre on a busy motorway the overwhelming feeling is not of amusement but of witnessing rank stupidity. There are typical Hulot-ian moments, such as his attempt to help with a recalcitrant pen or climb a creeper up the side of a house but they are too few, and it is a wait until nearly the end for a clever dogs-and-their-owners windscreen-wiper gag.
Trafic is filmed in Tati’s usual manner, eschewing closeups and staying close to the fixed-camera silent comedy aesthetic. He has fun with the freebies that even then were being handed out by petrol stations and the recent American landing on the moon, but his view of the simpler technology of earth-bound cars draws attention to gridlock, individualism and has a pessimism that chimes with many people’s views today.
Trafic was shown with the original soundtrack, without subtitles. Much of the dialogue is in English and simple French, but there is also Dutch and the effect was of a modern Babel, some lines understood perfectly, some slightly, some not at all. Tati can be enjoyed purely visually, and the dialogue was clearly not an important part of the film – he would not expect his audience to speak all three languages. Nevertheless I think that a subtitled version – at least of the parts that Tati expected to be understood – would have been preferable.
The London comedy festival provides a great weekend of film and discussion for lovers of comedy. Find out details of the next edition on their website. If you want to start watching Jacques Tati movies then I recommend beginning with Les Vacances de M. Hulot.
Jonathan Powell
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