Jacques Tati directed only six features in his career.
Trafic was his fifth
feature and final great work. After the expensive failure of
Playtime, Tati
was forced to scale back his ambitions for
Trafic. More frustratingly, he had
to build the film around his famous screen creation Monsieur Hulot to secure
financing. Tati was more interested in creating from behind the camera but he
relented and the gangly comic icon made his fourth and final screen appearance in
Trafic.
In past films, amiable oddball Monsieur Hulot was a bemused outsider navigating the
craziness of the modern world. Tati's universe is not a hostile place, just alien to
the old-fashioned Hulot, a gentle soul just slightly out of step with the pace of
life and the march of technology, fascinated and often flummoxed but always game. In
Trafic he's less an outsider that a professional dreamer in a business world.
He's an automobile designer for the (fictional) Altra company and his latest
creation, a compact car camper, comes equipped with more visual gags and hidden
accessories than a Tex Avery cartoon, from a front grill that doubles as a cooking
grill to a horn that pulls out of the steering column to become an electric razor.
The camper is the centerpiece of Altra's offerings at the Amsterdam Car Show, or
would be if can ever get there. This cutting edge contraption is packed into a
ramshackle, broken-down truck that hits every road movie mishap imaginable on the
road from Paris to Amsterdam: flat tire, empty gas tank, urban gridlock, highway
fender-bender turned bumper-car snarl. The car is even impounded at the border,
thanks to the distracted drive of Maria (Maria Kimberly), the American public
relations professional hired to pull the event together. She zips around in her
sporty convertible as if she doesn't notice (or at least acknowledge) the other
drivers on the road, and the Altra truck gets caught in the chaos of her wake.
The film bounces between their progress (or, more accurately, lack of progress) and
the sights and sounds of the auto show, where the Altra rep parks his desk in a
stall empty but for a backdrop of cardboard trees: a campsite waiting for its
camper. The running tape of pre-recorded bird chirps only adds to the surreal
spectacle of this manufactured slice of the natural world in the crawl of convention
center crowds. All the while Tati carries us along his lazy river of comedy, playing
with sight gags shot in long takes and letting the audience see the bits of business
erupt all over the frame in long shot. Tati is the great observer of human behavior,
at rest and motion. In
Trafic, there is plenty of both.
The centerpiece pile-up becomes a crescendo of sorts, a comic collision with no
fatalities that ends with a hush cast over the film. In the silence of the
automotive stasis, the tranquil sounds of the natural world are heard: birds twitter
quietly (an echo of the canned sounds of the car show?) as the humans pull
themselves out of their cars, stretch and take a second to orient themselves. It's
as if they've wakened from a dream world of mechanical conveyance and stepped out of
their armored bubbles to tentatively explore a vulnerable world of human
interaction, if they dare. Or even notice. Only Hulot seems concerned enough to
survey the chaos and confirm that all is well. His legs shoot him from one wreck to
another like a cantering horse, his stork-like body leaning this way and that; Tati
has an amazing talent for making it look like his legs and his body have different
ideas of which way to go.
While Tati painstaking builds his comedy from an aggregation of tiny details and
gently observed comic moments, there's also an easy looseness that you don't see in
Playtime. In one of the film's most warmly funny moments, two mechanics
return from watching the televised moonwalk to finish working on the camper – in
slow motion, miming the low-gravity movements of the astronauts. They are playful
boys for a few seconds until the real world of grown-ups and big business intrudes
to speed them up. And as their deadline passes in the cascade of disasters, Hulot
and company resign themselves to their halting progress and allow themselves to
enjoy a stop by the Dutch canals, making use of the camper's amenities for a
leisurely breakfast before heading back out on the road. Only one gag feels out of
place, a cruel joke perpetrated by a shaggy group of hippies who steal Maria's dog
and substitute a stand-in to fool her into thinking that her dog is dead: another
casualty of the car culture. But Tati ultimately lets the coolly efficient and
imperiously impersonal Maria warm up and relax through the course of the ordeal.
As with
Playtime, Tati turns the soundtrack into a symphony of sound effects
and dialogue, the words less important than the mix of languages (French, English,
Dutch and Flemish, and possibly more echoing in the background of the car show
scenes) and distinctive vocal inflections. The dialogue is all post-dubbed, treated
more like music than lyrics, brought in to accompany scenes as he sees (or hears)
fit. If you closely at the actors' faces, you'll see plenty of mouths flapping over
silence.
"I find it important to give comic situations real settings," Tati explained in a
1974 TV interview. What could be more real than the ebb and flow of commuter
culture? He claims that he prepared be simply watching the Sunday morning traffic
from high upon an overpass. "No one was smiling," he observed, apparently his cue to
find the humor inherent in the situation.
Trafic began as a French-Dutch
co-production to be jointly directed by Tati and Dutch filmmaker Bert Hannstra, but
after shooting a few early scenes (including many of the shots in the traffic jam
montages, which have a candid quality very different from Tati's more controlled
shooting style), Hannstra dropped out, frustrated by Tati's absence, and Tati took
over as the sole director. When funds started to run out, Tati drafted a Swedish
film crew (which had arrived to shoot a documentary about production) to pitch in
for a couple of scenes. But despite the lower budget,
Trafic was a financial
bust and the last film Tati was able to exert any real control over (his final film,
Parade, was a semi-documentary set in the circus and made for Swedish TV).
Trafic has long been considered a "lesser" Tati, coming in the wake of his
masterpiece
Playtime. It's an unfair judgment of an imaginative, clever,
gently humorous spoof of car culture and the drivers who are stuck in its gridlock.
Tati fills the film with gags as lovely as they are funny and executes them with the
comic poetry of a silent film master in the modern world of sound and color.
Criterion's new 2-disc DVD is a marvelous opportunity to revisit and reassess the
film. In addition to the excellent high-definition transfer, the set features
In
the Footsteps of M. Hulot, a 1989 two-part documentary tracing the evolution of
Tati's onscreen alter-ego directed by Sophie Tatischeff, Tati's editor on
Playtime,
Parade and
Trafic. She's also, one should add, Tati's
daughter (she reclaimed the original family name that her father shortened for
show-biz), and the survey of Tati's career and art is also her tribute to her
father, who died in 1982. Also features a 1971 TV interview with the cast of
Trafic (where one of the co-stars observes that "shooting a [Tati] comedy
scene was like shooting a horror scene" – make of that what you will) and the
15-minute
The Comedy of Jacques Tati, a 1973 episode of the French TV series
Morceaux de bravoure. It's essentially a staged interview show, with Tati's
answers all prepared (if not actually rehearsed), and the talk segments interspersed
with priceless performances by Tati, illustrating his unique are of mime comedy
while providing a running commentary. The set is completed with a trailer and a
booklet with a new essay by film critic Jonathan Romney.
For more information about
Trafic, visit
The Criterion Collection.To order
Trafic, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
