Jour de fête

It may not be a critically respectable position to take, but I just don't find the revered French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati very funny. Compared with clowns like Buster Keaton -- or for that matter Jerry Lewis -- his near-silent shtick seems rather dull and crude. So the restoration of the previously black-and-white Jour de fête (1947/1961) into color, as was originally intended, doesn't strike me as momentous, especially since the results derived from the long defunct Thomsoncolor process are rather dull and crude also.

Set in the roughhewn French backwater of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, the film tells of the town's awakening to an itinerant fair and that fair's effect on the slow-witted local postman, François (Tati). The real-life little village is detailed with earthy exactness and love, and some of the sequences induce titters, such as one classic bit that explores how many ways a drunk, a bicycle, and a fence can foul up. But the central conceit -- François sees a film on modernized American postal methods and is goaded into imitating them -- is both corny and self-conscious. Screens at the Kendall Square Saturday the 13th at 5, 7, and 9 p.m. and Sunday the 14th at 1 and 3 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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