Jour de fête

Among his admirers are Jean Cocteau and François Truffaut; and Marguerite Duras called Jacques Tati (1908-1982) "perhaps the world's greatest filmmaker." But few in America are familiar with the French sight-gag king, who wrote, directed, and starred in such abiding comic classics as Monsieur Hulot's Vacation (1953), Mon oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967). Emulating Chaplin in Modern Times, Tati would often unleash his screen persona amid technology run faceless and wild. Dancing himself through the manmade environment with a pipe and a cane, he responded to mechanical chaos as matter-of-factly, as dexterously, as straight-facedly as Buster Keaton in The General.

Jour de fête (1947), Tati's first film, newly restored in color, is a mild apprentice work for his later near-masterpieces. It's a whimsical tale about a one-day fair in the town square of a small French village. A carnival roustabout, Roger (Guy Decobie), flirts with a local gal whenever his wife turns her head. The town postman, François (Tati), delivers the mail by bicycle.

There's no story at all, just lots of comme ci comme ça visual gags. Tati is pretty funny when, dead drunk, he tries to mount his bicycle from the other side of a fence. He gets funnier when, emulating American mailmen he encounters in a chauvinist US documentary (they deliver letters by dropping from a helicopter), he decides that speed is everything. He races his bicycle, frenzied American-style, until he learns the lesson that slow and French is A-okay. Tati's pre-Monsieur Hulot persona is Charles De Gaulle on wheels, as a lanky, likable country rube.

-- Gerald Peary