The Sublime Philosopher

I'm not sure if I've proven my worth as a blogger. First off, this is my first blog in close to two months. Did I hit a wall? Let's rephrase that: HAVE I hit a wall? Possibly. I haven't had much to discuss in the last month and a half. Maybe because college football season is in full swing, I'm just not feeling it quite as much. I don't know. I'm trying to remedy that, though. I, also, believe that my identity as a film-blogger needs to cover all walks of life within the film world. By that I mean I haven't quite branched out enough. I haven't discussed foreign films on a deeper level. Sure, I've mentioned the directors, but I haven't broken down their films. The themes, plots, characters, etc. I'd like to fix that, right now. I want to discuss a director named Jacques Tatischeff or better known as Jacques Tati.

Tati was an entertainer in the mold of the vaudeville acts of the early age of cinema. Like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin before him, he wrote, directed, produced, AND starred in all of his films. He, also, made his films during the height of the "talkie" picture, yet, hardly ever uttered a single word in any of them. Yes, they had sound in the conventional sense, but dialogue was not really an issue. He loved observing human behavior and by doing this his films became comedies because he progressively viewed human behavior as something of a joke. Each film was seen through the eyes of Tati's alter-ego Monsieur Hulot. Hulot is a bit of a trouble-maker, though I'd say his heart is in the right place. He has no intention of causing trouble, but that's just what happens. At heart, the character is a very sweet individual who walks through life with the right amount of optimism.

Mind you, these are my own personal observations through viewings of only three of his films: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Playtime. The latter became a personal failure at the time, bankrupting Tati, but the film has reached "masterpiece" status since then. In these three films, alone, viewers got to see a transition from light-hearted fare to light-hearted satire to a meditation on the times. Was Tati growing more cynical as he grew older? Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is a delightful French film, following Hulot to a French Riviera resort, where he encounters a motley cast of characters. Mon Oncle is Tati's transitional film. It's the bridge between Holiday and Playtime. Tati comments on industrialization, where houses have taken on a life of their own. The structures are impersonal and very uncomfortable. He makes his point clear by transitioning back and forth between his sister's family's home and his own neighborhood, which is probably the same neighborhood that he left to go on his vacation in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Yes, Hulot is optimistic, but he's also an older gentleman set in his ways. I guess so was Tati. The best satirical prop in Mon Oncle is a fountain at Hulot's sister's house. It's this ridiculous metallic fish standing upright that spews out a stream of water every time a button is pressed. Hulot's sister only does this when she has company. The sound effects in this film are hysterical. You think, in the beginning, that Tati has pushed the audio up way too much, but in actuality he's enhancing the satire by making all things industrial sound loud and obnoxious. It took me a second to get it.

Playtime is in a class all its own. It stands by itself in the Tati canon for several reasons. Hulot is still in the film, but he's more of a background artist. Also, Playtime has no real story structure. It's just a bunch of characters coming in and out in this large, modern world. Hulot just ties them all together with his presence. If Hulot was the slightest bit confused in Mon Oncle, he is downright lost in Playtime. He doesn't do as much strolling in this film as he does in his others. He wonders about with an uncertainty that is told through his body language. I say this because not a single shot in Playtime is close-up. It's all long and medium shots. So, you have no choice but to judge the character's behavior by their body language. You never get to see their faces.

The story behind this film bankrupting Tati is that he created an entire city on the outskirts of Paris, which has become known as "Tativille". Watch this film and look how large it is. It's shot with the Panorama 70 millimeter camera lens, which is the same type used for such David Lean epics as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. What comedian is this dedicated to this type of filmmaking? You'd still be hard-pressed to find any comedic director, today, who would shoot a film like this. All of the buildings, roads, street lights, and vehicles are all apart of this one massive set that Tati created. Nothing is officially "on location". I like that idea, because I feel that Tati conveyed his message even more so by doing it that way. He created a modern world that almost exists in reality, but it's all Tati. It's what he sees the world becoming. Impersonal, stifling, and out of reach. The best scene in the film comes about an hour in, where we see the opening of a restaurant. Most if not all the characters in the first hour end up appearing, all at once, in this restaurant, which has one of the most doomed openings you could ever imagine. The brilliant thing about it is that you never witness any of the characters having as much fun in the face of chaos as they do in this scene. It's a lovely thing to see.

Tati's vision became broader than some of the filmmakers who preceded him. Yes, Chaplin and Keaton, both, faced modernization head-on, but I don't think they did it in the scope that Tati did. Maybe Tati had to deal with serious issues of change in his society, but he was at the age where he still could still speak out about it. I feel that he wanted to be a spokesman for the ones who felt the same way he did, but he could still do it in such a polite and seemingly innocent way. I've walked away from each of the Tati films I've seen wondering if I truly appreciated them in the way they should be appreciated. I was skeptical at first and if you've seen any of his films before, maybe you were too, but I see the vision, now. I see his love for comfort and distaste for the not-well-known and I not only appreciate it, I truly identify with it. This was a great filmmaker.