More earthbound than his later movies, Jacques Tati's first feature-length film gains poignancy in hindsight of the Monsieur Hulot pictures -- the world he so lovingly celebrates here is to become a memory amid the future glass and steel. The opening (a long-shot of a tractor pulling a cart full of merry-go-round horses, slowly puttputting through the pastoral countryside) is a celebration of bucolic populism, penciling in the people of a small Normandy burg on the eve of Bastille's Day reveries -- the tavern owner and the varnished chairs that won't dry, a wife parading a Parisian silver lamé imitation, a bent crone who keeps walking her goat in and out of the action. It's not until after a good ten minutes of leisurely detailing that Tati, as his François the postman character (last seen in Tati's 1947 short L'École des Facteurs) makes his entrance. His provincial pride hurt by the breathless panting of a newsreel panting on high-tech American mail carriers, François goes postal: devising shortcuts to speed up delivery, he punctures the village's sit-back-and-watch-the-geese-go-by harmony. Right away, the Tati hallmarks: a tone of ineffable gentleness blending with and a fear of technology taking over nature (at the beginning, a couple of steeds get a look at the carousel plaster figures and gallop away). More strikingly, there's the visualization of comedy that soaks up the story's reactionary whimsy and makes Tati not so much the heir of Sennet and Keaton as the forefather of Antonioni, Jancsó, Kiarostami and Kitano. The essence of comic art here is extracted not only from the what, but also from the how -- from the positioning of people and objects within the spaces of the screen, so that
the funniness of a situation arises not from the raw materials by themselves but from how they relate to the totality of the world. Gag after gag is sculptured in terms of distance, space, and how sounds relate to the images -- the soundtrack from an American Western turns into commentary on a couple's tentative romance, and a door slamming shut shifts a skit's
entire meaning by revealing a dead body. In its fond evocation of rural milieu and community life, the film is Tati's warmest work, with his post-WWII optimism as heartfelt as electronic-age chilliness is engulfing in Playtime. Shot in both black and white and in the experimental Thomson-Color process.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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