Welcome to Film School! This is a column focused on movie history and all the stars, filmmakers, events, laws and, yes, movies that helped write it. Film School is a place to learn—no homework required.
It’s impossible to do justice in writing to the way Monsieur Hulot moves—but it’s fun to try.
Somehow, he seems simultaneously uncomfortable and too comfortable in whatever environment he finds himself. His walk is an endearing mix of bouncy strut, bumble and overeager stride, tilted forward at such an odd angle that he looks perpetually at risk of falling on his face. Adding to the overall effect is his outfit: jauntily-angled hat, rumpled overcoat, ever-dangling pipe. Though none of those elements are extraordinary in themselves, the very ordinariness of them, combined with Hulot’s unique physicality, coalesce into magic.
Born in France in 1907, Jacques Tati—the man who both dreamed up and played Hulot—was descended from aristocracy. He left his comfortable upbringing and a job in the family picture framing business to develop his skills as a mime artist, spending the 1930s perfecting an act that he took on stages around Europe. During that decade, Tati started making short movies, experimenting with how he might translate his live act to the big screen.
He only directed six feature-length films in all; from the first,1949’s Jour de fête, to the fourth,1969’s Playtime, each grew larger and more ambitious than the one before.
While it was a hugely expensive flop at the time, one which sent Tati into bankruptcy and a slow career death spiral, many now consider Playtime his masterpiece. As with all his movies, it is relatively plotless, instead placing Hulot in the middle of an enormous futuristic city and watching him, and a huge cast of unknowns, interact with their surroundings. On release, it was the most expensive French film ever made, with its set, “Tativille,” vast enough to need its own access roads and power plant. It was a formidable feat, arguably unmatched to this day for a comedy in terms of sheer scale and artistry. Still, audiences had fallen in love with Hulot, and he was hard to find amid Playtime’s dizzying architecture, both literal and metaphorical. It was a world away from the simplicity of the film that introduced him to his public.
That film was 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. As usual, there’s no real plot; Tati’s charming hero checks into a hotel by the sea, and gentle chaos follows in his wake.
Tati’s films weren’t silent (in fact, much has been written about his innovative use of sound), but the dialogue was inconsequential; Hulot himself speaks only a handful of words throughout the whole film, most when he’s trying to check in at the seaside hotel with his pipe still dangling from his lips. He was a mime at heart, and movement—the grace, the humor, the creativity and the drama of it—was what fascinated him above all.
Although Tati starred in all six of the movies he directed, they still had an egalitarian bent; he didn’t hog all the punchlines. One of the more dramatic vignettes sees a small boy with an ice cream cone in each hand making his way slowly up the hotel steps, only to be confronted by a closed door with a handle higher than his head. Tati doesn’t leave us hanging for long—as he reaches for the handle, the cone seems to defy gravity, staying in place throughout the nerve wracking maneuver. The boy potters inside and hands one of the cones to his friend, and the two of them watch avidly as a worker at the hotel hangs up some decorations while standing on a ladder. They’re as hooked by the precarity of his situation as we were by their own a few moments earlier.
So much of Tati’s work is explicitly about people watching, and reacting to each other. Before heading off for a game of tennis, Hulot buys a racket, and pays close attention as the cashier gives him a demonstration of how to use it: a horizontal jab, a quick retract and then a rapid downward swat. That bizarre movement becomes Hulot’s serve and, somehow, it makes him such a formidable player that the court is soon littered with grumbling felled opponents, all miming his odd motion exasperatedly and sighing to themselves. A child is watching from a table tennis court set up next door. He copies Hulot, and easily bests his miniature rival.
Sometimes, there’s such a lot going on in the frame, it’s difficult to know just what to watch. This is particularly the case in Playtime, when Tati purposefully set up multiple visual gags to be playing at once, but his creative use of depth of field also comes into play in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. The beginning of one of the movie’s best running jokes starts with us observing Hulot, near the back of the frame, watching something avidly, becoming ever more uneasy. Soon our eyes adjust, and we see in the immediate foreground that it’s a gloop of ice cream at a vendor’s stand heading inexorably towards the floor. Just as an anxious Hulot is about to leap in and save the day, the vendor casually rights the situation himself. That ice cream will menace our hero for the rest of the film. (If anyone could be menaced by ice cream, it’s Hulot!)
Like the great silent comedians that inspired him, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the on-screen Jacques Tati appeared loveably shambolic. Off-screen however, also like Keaton and Chaplin, he was a master craftsman, with an eye for detail that bordered on the obsessive.
Tati once said, “If I make a picture, I will fight to do that picture, and I will fight to express what I want to express, even if I make a mistake.” Even when the film had been released, he never stopped fighting; Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was adored, Tati rapidly elevated to global fame—but he was still convinced it could be better. On the Criterion Blu-ray (or StudioCanal in Europe), you are presented with two versions of the movie: the 1953 original, and the 1978 director’s cut. That the 1978 cut is actually shorter than the original release is instructive as to Tati’s meticulousness. He was not so convinced of his own genius that he thought everything he did was right, and thus more was better; instead he would relentlessly chisel away at his work, even decades after it was already out in the world, in an incessant quest to make it the best he could.
This quest for perfection may have come at the cost of great financial turmoil, but Tati’s legacy is priceless. His work has influenced everything from the practical sets in Barbie, to Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal: there are parodies and homages in films by Robert Altman, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Francois Truffaut, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Hartley and Ridley Scott. Even the house in The Powerpuff Girls was inspired by the house in Tati’s Mon Oncle! The abundant joy in his movies, the infectious love of people and their idiosyncrasies, the way he showed us how to look at the world—Tati’s slim filmography had an outsized effect on cinema and TV across the globe.
Not bad for an unassuming man with the funniest walk you ever did see.
Next week: things get a whole lot darker on our month-long holiday by the sea, as we explore Purple Noon and the malevolent beauty of Alain Delon.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.