Salute Your Shorts: Jacques Tati's "Cours du soir"

Considered one of the comedic geniuses of cinema, Jacques Tati has always had an odd reputation due to his mixture of comedy and avant-garde filmmaking. American silent comedies were always relatively straightforward, boisterous affairs where filmmaking usually came a distant second to gags. With his features Chalie Chaplin ambitiously tried to push things further, as did Buster Keaton at the height of his powers. But they were the exception, not the rule, and for the most part, lowbrow comedies ruled the day. Anyone who’s taken a glance at Tyler Perry’s painful oeuvre of and its box-office intake will understand that this hasn’t really changed.

Tati was an extremely gifted physical comedian, whose brand of mime combined naturalistic observation with a vaguely whimsical, almost dance-like movement. He came out of the vaudevillian circuit as a solo performer to transition to his other love, filmmaking, and the result was pretty successful. One role led to another, and soon enough Tati had enough clout to direct and write the films he was starring in, becoming particularly popular in the guise of his Monsieur Hulot character, a sort of bumbling everyman who wandered his way in and out of trouble largely due to his difficulties living in a mechanized world.

Tati had bigger plans than to simply mill around as Hulot and make money, though, and by the '60s he was tiring of his creation. It’s hard not to suspect that some of this came from a difficulty in separating Tati from his character, which has also been an issue for audiences with Chaplin, Keaton and other silent era film stars. Most of this seems to stem from Tati’s sheer ambition, though, as he became a director as controlling as Kubrick and just as demanding. Tati’s plans came into fruition with Playtime, a bigger, more experimental movie than any he’d done before and one of the most ambitious film projects ever ventured. The film took three years and virtually overran an entire small city (according to legend), called Tativille, in order to accomplish its goal of creating and then destroying a perfectly ordered society.

A lot of factors went into Playtime becoming the massive financial disaster it was, one that nearly ended Tati’s career (he only finished one more fictional feature and a documentary during the rest of his life) and reduced him to bankruptcy. Some of these were circumstantial such as natural disasters that slowed down shooting; some were related to Tati’s obsessive control over the film, which frequently slowed production to a standstill. But a big one was just that audiences didn’t really want to see a bloated, two-and-a-half-hour (quickly shortened down to 124 minutes) silent picture that, frankly, isn’t all that funny. Considering its American release didn't come until the '70s, whereas Chaplin’s last major silent comedy was 1936’s Modern Times, it’s hard to blame them.

Playtime wasn’t Tati’s only 1967 film (its release year in France), though; it was merely the only one he directed. Tati also wrote and starred in "Cours du soir," which was filmed by Playtime’s assistant director Nicolas Ribowski during one of the feature’s breaks, and comes attached to the new Blu-ray release of the film. Although both films were written by Tati and spend a great deal of time showcasing his brand of occasionally-funny mime, that’s one of the few similarities between the works, which stand in oddly direct opposition to one another.

While Playtime is made up of original comedic set-pieces meant to showcase a new direction for Tati, "Cours du soir" is plainly derivative in every way you can imagine. A 30-minute film, "Cours" uses the premise that Tati is teaching an evening course on mime to an oddly sophisticated classroom (no student in the room is without a jacket and tie) and with this displays some of his best-known bits from both earlier films and his time on the stage. This involves showing off impressions of different smokers, fishers, horse riders, etc., including his perhaps most famous impression, the postman, which featured heavily in both "L'École Des Facteurs" and Jour de fête. Not particularly well-edited or well-shot, it’s pretty much 29 minutes of straight gags. While Playtime had much greater ambitions, "Cours" was all about giving the audience what it wanted: observational humor without all the pretension.

Of course, that assumes that Tati’s humor is in and of itself worth watching, something a lot of audiences today don’t seem to find particularly true for silent comedy in general. Tati in particular is an acquired taste, lacking many of the overt slapstick elements that made his predecessors more popular and more easily understood. To be quite frank, I don’t particularly care for his humor myself, partially, I would assume, because of a lack of dick and fart jokes that are so important to the contemporary comedy I was raised on, and partly, I suspect, because his stuff just isn’t all that funny. It’s clever, cute, and in some ways deep, in what it sees going on in the human psyche. It’s not particularly funny, though, and while on occasion you’ll hear some laughter trickling in during a screening of one of his films, you’ll never hear much more unless someone opens up a tank of nitrous oxide in the room.

This actually paints "Cours" into an odd corner. On the one hand, it’s kind of a 30-minute best-of for Tati’s impressive mime skills with a little added amusement from laughing at bourgeois French men trying to follow suit. No harm there. But unfortunately those sketches aren’t actually all that funny, especially without the context of a character. Suffice to say, "Cours" is a good idea in theory but difficult to sit through in reality it's entirety, even with its short runtime.

As a counterpart to Playtime, it becomes interesting simply in its opposition to the more polished and complex feature film. Where Playtime is silent, "Cours" talks incessantly and consequently often ruins its own jokes. Mr. Hulot is in Playtime, but takes a supporting role to the world around him. While he’s gone in "Cours," Tati himself stars and does his best to channel Hulot, canceling out the separation between the two he attempted with the feature. The list of dichotomies between these two seemingly similar films goes on for quite a while.

As an end result, "Cours" is the best example of how Tati can be both a lousy comedian, despite his reputation, and a great director. Taken as a series of jokes, his observations quickly wear thin, but given a world for them to dance in, Tati becomes an omniscient master of contemporary absurdities. Although it seems like "Cours" would be the more enjoyable of the two films, it’s no exaggeration to say that the short is little more than a footnote to its bigger brother.