‘Trafic’: When Tati Drove Himself to the Edge

Jacques Tati’s penultimate, transcendent film “Trafic” (1971) is one of those often misperceived or neglected works by great filmmakers that deserve better than they’ve got and will surely, however long it takes, gain their righteous stature. “Don’t play what the public wants,” Thelonious Monk famously advised. “Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing — even if it does take them 15, 20 years.”For Tati’s film, 37 years may be the magic number. Next week, the Criterion Collection will bring it to DVD in a spiffy transfer that underscores the fastidiously edited, razor-sharp photography by Frenchman Marcel Weiss and Dutchman Edward van den Enden.The idea that “Trafic” is critically regarded as minor Tati is so widespread that even the insightful essay by Jonathan Romney accompanying the film retails its presumed failings: “a hovering tone of despair,” the absence of “a clearly defined goal,” “humor drawn out or diffuse to the point of near abstraction” — “[Tati] himself saw it as a step back after the accomplished vision of ‘Playtime.'” Putting aside the probability that anything would have been anticlimactic after “Playtime,” the outsized 1967 comic marathon that bankrupted Tati and garnered little of the adulation heaped upon his three earlier films (1949’s “Jour de fête,” 1953’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” and 1958’s “Mon Oncle”), this is an example of critics paying more attention to what the director said than to what he put on the screen.“Trafic” is a step to the side, not back. Its clearly defined tripartite structure is one of its key delights, along with an abundance of visual and aural gags, including a few of the best set pieces in Tati’s small oeuvre (only six features, concluding with his circus quasi-documentary, “Parade,” shot for Swedish television in 1974 and released theatrically a year later). Tati is said to have complained that he was forced to revive his most famous character, M. Hulot, as the only way of financing “Trafic”; if so, let us praise, for once, the commercial dictates that obliged Tati to give that elusive caricature of a man a satisfying and moving last act. We had seen Hulot on vacation, at home, and as an endlessly multiplying everyman; in “Trafic,” we see him at work and, just possibly, in love with a woman who, for most of the film, is his polar opposite.At the end of “Trafic,” Hulot, fired from his job, moves forward, arm in arm with the brazen Maria Kimberly (played by an American fashion model named Maria Kimberly), disappearing into the traffic of umbrellas as pedestrians maneuver around stalled cars. The picture’s structure, however, works backward through Tati’s cinematic career. “Trafic” is a road picture that never gets anywhere. It follows Hulot’s attempt to transport a camper he designed for the Altra motor company to an automobile show in Amsterdam. A series of breakdowns and diversions keep him and his staff spinning their wheels in Belgium until the auto show is over. But if cars get stuck, people move forward.The first section of “Trafic” reflects the big-canvas style of “Playtime,” with gags steadily accruing in a frame that meshes foreground and background and favors visual pleasures over jokes, as in the stunning montage of Altra’s assembly lines — a passage involving overhead shots, close-ups, and a symphony of industrial noises that recalls Joris Ivens’s 1931 documentary “Philips Radio.” There is little dialogue in “Trafic,” and most of it is inconsequential, but every shot and sound effect has its reason. A casual remark about stringing measurement wires across the floor leads to a pullback in which workers high-step over them like the ponies Tati mimed in his music hall years. When a tall Dutch executive exits his Citroen, it settles down on its wheels, emitting a sigh of relief. A couple of tossed-off bits are right out of Buster Keaton — a worker improvising desk drawers as a ladder, another painting a beam without moving his arm (he’s on a cart rolled back and forth).The main players make characteristic entrances. Hulot, late for work, angles his way, storklike, into his office, where his attempts to draw a straight line are foiled by anyone who opens his door. Maria imperiously forces her way into every situation with the announcement, “I am public relations!” — a portrait to which all creatures of media can relate. Maria, accompanied by her dog, drives a tiny yellow sports car that is so small she stores one of many hats in the spare-tire compartment. Yet somehow it accommodates an immense wardrobe. Maria wears a different outfit in each scene, sometimes within different shots in the same scene. Another recurring gag concerns a gas station that gives every customer a preposterous plaster bust of a historical figure; no one wants it, but everyone takes it — it’s free.In the second section, Tati returns to the extended hilarious set pieces that characterized his first two Hulot movies. These include highway montages in which a radio advertises “a new raincoat especially for the sun” while the drivers, presuming themselves invisible behind the wheel, ponderously pick their noses. One nose-picker is low humor, and two is vulgar, but nine or 10, climaxing with two in the same shot, is golden. Amid shots of an auto graveyard is the sight of a car being towed over bumpy ground, emitting noises that sound like “Ow! Ooph! Ow! Ooph!”The most famous sequence in this section is the minute-long road accident, a benign pileup that finishes with a Volkswagen’s hood flapping up and down like a giant tongue, and is followed by an inspired ballet of back-stretching and damage inspection, including a priest kneeling in obeisance to his motor while Hulot pirouettes through the rubble. Yet it is preceded by a splendid 12-minute tour de force in which Tati shows his loving assimilation of Mack Sennett: Gags are offered in a relentless profusion as Hulot and company are stopped at a Belgian border patrol. They are obliged to demonstrate the camper, a car that can shower and shave its occupant while barbecuing a steak. The cops include Fric and Frac doubles and an inspector whose hair is raised in perfect imitation of Tintin. There are so many bits that you may miss one of the best: Hulot doffs his hat to a bride (also stopped at the border) while walking through a cloud of auto steam. When he doffs his hat again, the steam he scooped from the air the first time rises from his head.The final sequence is set in the country, recalling the bucolic humor and tempo of Tati’s first feature, “Jour de fête,” and makes generous use of a particular kind of gag associated with Harold Lloyd, in which what appears to be one thing turns out to be something else. In a thoroughly entertaining two-part documentary, “Tati in the Footsteps of M. Hulot,” made in 1989 by his daughter Sophie Tatischeff and included in the Criterion release, Tati explains the difference between a visual gag that surprises the viewer — which Tati says is his own way of working — and one that announces its cleverness in a setup, as he says Chaplin might have done.In the defining gag in the finale of “Trafic,” he uses the latter method to trick Maria into thinking a shaggy coat is her dead dog. It’s a cruel joke, but funny, and has the unexpected effect of humanizing her; from that point on, her clothing is informal and constant. In the final not-what-you-think moment, Maria and Hulot wrestle over the coat, which to distant observers looks like lovemaking — perhaps a metaphor for Jacques Tati’s relationship with M. Hulot.Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”

‘Trafic’: When Tati Drove Himself to the Edge

‘Trafic’: When Tati Drove Himself to the Edge

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