The Criterion Collection distributes classic foreign and independent films on home video, but the company is removing all of its movies from Netflix streaming by the end of 2011. Instant Cue suggests Criterion titles still available on Netflix by focusing on a different filmmaker each week.
This Tuesday, the Academy Award-nominated The Illusionist hit stores on Blu-ray and DVD. From the acclaimed director of The Triplets of Belleville, the animated feature tells the story of an illusionist and a young girl convinced that his magic is authentic. This story about the passing of an old world is based on an unfinished script by French filmmaker Jacques Tati. In fact, the titular character is based on Tati himself. Although the film opened to nearly unanimous praise, I hesitated out of skepticism and ultimately missed my chance to see the film in theaters. The Illusionist is probably enjoyable on its own terms, but I would much rather spend my time watching the actual films of Tati.
Film buffs often debate whether Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton is the cinema’s greatest mime, but Jacques Tati deserves the title just as much as either of the two silent comedians. Although Tati made sound features, dialogue is sparse and the films are packed with wildly inventive visual gags. A character as memorable and lovable as Chaplin’s Tramp, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot is always hunched over with his coat, umbrella and pipe. The character embodies the joys of life that have been lost and compromised in the age of modernity. In fact, the story of last year’s The Illusionist illustrates the trajectory of Tati’s films featuring Hulot. Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) are both filled with the visual trickery of a magician, yet as the progression of the two films indicate, Tati’s Hulot is lost and out of place in an increasingly modern world.
Mon Oncle features the second appearance of Hulot, and now in color after the black-and-white M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), he struggles against the mechanized and sterilized modern world. With a title translated into English as My Uncle, the film follows the relationship of Hulot and his nephew Gerard, whose parents are suckers for the materialistic and hierarchical superficiality of modernity. While Hulot lives in the old world of downtown France with lively street vendors and dogs running on the streets, the house of Gerard is a gated monstrosity, sporting the newest technology and adorned with absurd decorations. The worst is a fish fountain in front of the house, turned on by Gerard’s mother only when important guests arrive.
Like Chaplin in Modern Times, a critique of industrialism, Hulot finds himself at odds with the technology of the new world. His most outrageous battle with machinery takes place in a factory where he briefly works, only because his brother-in-law insists he must “stop dreaming and get down to work.” Hulot falls asleep supervising a machine, which consequently produces rubber hose resembling a chain of sausages. Confounded by Hulot’s incompetence, co-workers laugh hysterically and help him hide the mess. An outsider, Hulot proves unable to adapt to the tide of technological change. The empty, lifeless spaces of modern homes and factories begin to overshadow the playfulness of old French neighborhoods.
Even though Hulot struggles to find his place, Tati as a filmmaker and his characters have plenty of enjoyable tricks up their sleeves. Hulot’s nephew Gerard and his friends frequently play practical jokes on unsuspecting civilians. They gently kick the back bumpers of cars stuck in traffic, causing the deceived drivers to yell at the cars behind them for causing an accident. If the adults of the modern world are stuffy and cold, at least the children have a sense of humor and what Tati believes to be the lively spirit of old France. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Hulot sneaks outside of his sister’s home in the dark, and the shadows of two heads pop up in the circular windows of the house looking like irises spying on Hulot. Even when he seems disillusioned with the changing world, Tati demonstrates a great sense of humor and remains a cinematic illusionist of the highest order.
But if Mon Oncle is about old France and modern France existing in tension, Playtime declares the ultimate victory of modernity. While Mon Oncle presents Hulot in color for the first time, Playtime throws him into a 70 mm widescreen frame. With even less of a straightforward narrative than Tati’s previous films, this film is mostly composed of lengthy wide shots packed with comedic details.
Hulot becomes a peripheral character, lost amidst salesmen, company executives and American tourists. The film goes for long passages without Hulot. The protagonist audiences expect to see is phased out, and characters constantly mistake other men with coats for Hulot himself. Forcing the eyes of viewers to scan the dense but carefully choreographed images for Hulot, Playtime is reminiscent of the Where’s Waldo? books, but, more than just a game, the film is a biting commentary on modern society.
Hulot was uncomfortable in the world of Mon Oncle, but he simply has no idea where he is in Playtime. Trying to catch Mr. Giffard for a business meeting, he is lost in a maze of elevators, escalators and cubicles. At one point, Hulot finds Mr. Giffard, but instead of realizing that the two men are standing a few feet away from each other, Tati’s character waves at and pursues a reflection in the windows of the building next door. Tati uses his talent for staging and framing visual jokes to emphasize the alienation and impossibility of intimate human contact in a world of machines and skyscrapers.
Hulot’s final appearance in the film is easy to miss as he walks away in a wide shot with his back turned to the camera. The film is not an angry rejection of modernity, but Tati honestly admits that the old-fashioned Hulot does not fit in, and it is only natural for him to recede into the background.
Although this column focuses on Mon Oncle and Playtime, it is essential to watch the films of Tati in chronological order, starting with M. Hulot’s Holiday. The three films together demonstrate the progress of modern society and the increasing difficulty of fitting in for a simple man like Monsieur Hulot. Tati was a cinematic magician whose career was a decades-long disappearing act from the big screen. Skilled at choreographing and photographing illusions, he ironically employed those skills to comment on how he was no longer in fashion. But if the modest success of The Illusionist is any indication, there are still dreamers hungry for the magic of Jacques Tati.
You can sign on to your Netflix account now to stream M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle or Playtime.