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The opening announces Jacques Tati's kinship to Ozu, the crowd at the train station rushes from one side of the platform to the other and back as the locomotive chugs in, a matter of order and disorder. (A beautiful "pillow shot" later finds abandoned sandcastles in the afternoon.) Windy Brittany, a few days at the Hôtel de la Plage. Monsieur Hulot, first a hand waving from his rattling jalopy and then a big stork sweeping into the lobby, hat and pipe and loping gait, "un gentleman." Tables for playing poker and an empty ballroom indoors, striped parasols and tents outdoors. A vacationing gallery, the military fussbucket and the political windbag, the surly waiter and the British biddy, the wife who coos over seashells and the husband who tosses them away, the pretty blonde courted most bashfully (Nathalie Pascaud). Hulot the aloof bachelor is in there, mingling or not, another element in a meticulous frame. "A marvelous view, don't you think?" Tati's cinema as a world under a glass dome, serene in its mysterious juxtapositions. The spare tire covered in wet leaves finds new life as a funeral wreath (it promptly deflates once nailed to the tombstone), the cracked kayak becomes a snapping sea monster terrorizing beachgoers. The tessitura is equally attentive, from the mush-mouthed loudspeaker and the twang of a dinner-room door to the chatter of children and the continuous jazz score. "The key is a rigorous eclecticism." The clown on the margins, not an instigator of jokes but an angular fellow in the flow of things. The taffy that almost hits the ground and the ice cream that a boy carries up a flight of stairs, the gift of equilibrium. "Tati has a feeling for comedy because he has a feeling for strangeness" (Godard). Baudelaire's "feu d'artifice de la déesse Liberté" (cp. The Pink Panther), the concluding composition seals the work as a procession of postcards. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |