|
Reassuringly, humanity still picks its collective nose in the Automobile Age. Altra Motors of Paris, just one of the many companies seeking a spot at the Amsterdam International Auto Show, Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot is the unsteady hand at the drawing board. Between the factory and the cavernous expo is a world of roads, where Smithson's "straight line not in Nature" figures saliently. The latest invention is a camper replete with gadgets, from built-in tent and barbecue grill to shower stall ("start the engine for hot water") and bed with television, its main audience is a gaggle of custom officers at the border. Along for the ride are the muggy trucker (Marcel Fraval) and the Yankee PR agent of a thousand outfits (Maria Kimberly), everybody benefits from an impromptu holiday. Following the symphonic culmination of Playtime, further searches for people amid modernity. (Classicism has long become a plaster bust given away at the gas station.) Zipping cars, limping, snapping and spinning cars (MASH the year before has the blessing of the jeep), a smash-up at the carrefour makes for a good opportunity for drivers to step out into the open, stretch, interact. Nature is in danger of turning into a forest of cardboard cutouts and canned bird chirps, against this a déjeuner des canotiers from the vantage point of a Dutch garage, "a little French ingenuity" never hurts. Tati the surreal gagmeister (the ample décolletage that turns out to be a toddler's bottom, the afghan coat's wagging tail), Tati the teacher (industrial fidgeting for Tout va Bien, metallic exoskeletons for Humain, Trop Humain). Stay in your lane and risk missing a certain lunar miracle, thus the elevated closing view of the rainy labyrinth we've created for ourselves. With Honoré Bostel, François Maisongrosse, and Tony Knepper.
--- Fernando F. Croce |