Mr. Hulot's Holiday

    For some inexplicable reason, I decided yesterday to watch the 1953 debut of Jacques Tati's screen character Monsieur Hulot, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, known to English-speaking audiences as Mr. Hulot's Holiday.(1) I haven't seen it since I wrote about it ten years ago on this blog in a post I called "A Brief Vacation." But I remember the experience of watching it for the first time in a theater almost forty years ago. I felt then that it was charming - sufficiently delightful to justify its reputation. It is a bonafide classic - which means that most people accept it unquestioningly as an untouchable masterpiece, to place proudly alongside Chaplin's City Lights or Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. But what, then, is a "classic"? In his 1975 piece, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," Vernon Young makes an oh-so-necessary point: "If the word classic has any value left (after being attributed to movies which are merely old and, if truth be said, often inhumanly tedious), Here Is Your Life and the brace of Emigrant films are classics; they define with unique richness the material of which they are composed."(1)

In his 2004 essay for Criterion, David Ehrenstein called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, "One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made."(2) Really? Even Roger Ebert had reservations. "The first time I saw Jacques Tati's 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday,'" Ebert wrote in 1996, "I didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to. But I didn't forget the film, and I saw it again in a film class, and then bought the laserdisc and saw it a third and fourth time, and by then it had become part of my treasure. But I still didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to, and now I think I understand why. It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular."(3)

In my experience of Tati's film, the trajectory was reversed: the film has shrunk with each subsequent viewing. I get Ebert's point about the film's evocation of "memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer." The film is dripping with the mood of summer vacations - even of the strange compulsion to have them once a year, along with everyone else in the Western world. The crazy rush to the train station, the panic and congestion and the long journey off the been track to arrive - at last - at the beach. I am there completely. And the wistfulness of the end - it hurts a little every time I see it.

But after seeing it again on home video in the '80s, then on laserdisc, and DVD (every new medium gives us an excuse to watch all these old films again), it got smaller, thinner, less substantial each time. The word "charming" continues to rise to my fingertips. But I feel less obliged than ever to call the film great. Sixty-six years after it was made, if the word classic still has a meaning, Mr. Hulot's Holiday is not one.


(1) But why the Anglicism "Holiday" when Vacation is closer to "Vacance"?
(1) Vernon Young, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," reprinted by permission from Jan Troell, edited by Lars-Olof Lothwall (Stockholm: The Swedish Film Institute, 1975).
(2) "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," David Ehrenstein
(3) "Great Movie: Mr. Hulot's Holiday," November 6, 1996.

Adieu Philippine

Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.

The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.

Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.

At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.

The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.

Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.

I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.

I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.


(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."

A Brief Vacation

I have seen one of the films Jacques Tati appeared in prior to Jour de Fete (1949), which launched, if that is the word, his career as a filmmaker. It was Autant-Lara's charming romance, Sylvie et le fantome (1946). Tati played a romantic ghost, which prevented him from having to speak but which also made it necessary to use double-exposure in all his scenes, which made his performance somewhat insubstantial. But it showed me that Tati had been a character player, as did Jour de Fete, in which he played a village postman.

In 1953, a the ripe age of 46, he introduced the character he would play in three more feature films, known only by his last name, Hulot. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr Hulot's Holiday) is, by most estimates (which have never been that enthusiastic), his best film. I have read just one brief review of the film, in Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films. It wasn't a rave by any means, but, strangely, Tati would get a great deal more critical attention as his films grew worse, through 1958's Mon Oncle, 1967's Play Time, and 1971's Trafic. In all those films, emboldened to be philosophical, Tati tried to satirize life in the modern world. He was much better just looking at people and finding some of the absurd things they do funny, as in Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

People act silly when they travel and are in unfamiliar surroundings. It exaggerates their idiosyncrasies, and Tati observes these well. But as a film comedy that some people have compared to the best of Chaplin, Mr. Hulot's Holiday has long stretches that can only be called dull. As a filmmaker, Tati's framing and directing are good, but his pacing is bad. When Hulot in onscreen, things are much more interesting, because Tati was a gifted clown. For instance, thee is an earlier scene in the hotel dining room in which Tati is on the right of the frame and does practically nothing, while the maitre d' and the waiter go in and out of a swinging door. We are supposed to be watching them, but it is impossible to take one's eyes off Tati. This is as clear as any an example of Tati's miscalculation. I'd have watched ninety minutes of Tati just sitting there in character, rather than than have to bother about all those, to me extraneous details. (Try and imagine a ninety-minute film of buster Keaton sitting at a table.) Tati fancied he was such a brilliant observer of human nature (he wasn't) that he deprived us of himself.

Also, the film doesn't hold up well on subsequent viewings. Maybe I've seen it too many times, but I have seen Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) probably a dozen times over the years, and I look forward to seeing it again. The same goes for Keaton's The General (1926). There isn't a thing I don't know about either film, so I cannot say that they give me something new each time I see them. So why do I bother watching them so many times? I do it to renew my sense of what a film comedy should be, and to relive, however imperfectly, some of the wonder I felt on seeing them for the first time.

I get nothing like the same feeling with Mr. Hulot's Holiday, and I don't believe I'm being unfair to Tati by comparing him to Chaplin and Keaton. I'm only making the comparison because everyone else does, for reasons I can never understand. I know how much the auteur critics love him, and why - without, of course, agreeing with anything they say. Tati was an excellent clown, but he was simply not a very good filmmaker. Overlooking his very real talent by praising his imaginary genius is the real reason why Tati hasn't worn well in fifty years.

Silent Clowns

Walter Kerr's wonderful book, The Silent Clowns, is an overview of the great comic masters of the silent film era, from Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd to Harry Langdon and Laurel and Hardy. Their silent art did not die with the invention of sound, of course. Chaplin made two films well into the sound era, in 1931 and 1936, that kept themselves silent, even with recorded music and sound effects. The Frenchman, Jacques Tati created a character whom he named "Hulot" who appeared in four films, from 1953 to 1971. One of Hulot's distinguishing quirks was a tacit refusal to speak anything other than his name.

In 1989, the Englishman Rowan Atkinson introduced a character named Mr. Bean who has since become world famous, as popular in Beijing and Budapest as he is in Birmingham. Like Hulot, Bean says next to nothing in his films, except his name. Aside from his eighteen half-hour TV sketches, the last of which was made in 1995, Atkinson has played Bean in two feature films, Bean (1997) and Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), and has added his voice to an even more popular Mr. Bean animated series (2002-03).

The difference with our latter day silent clowns is that their silence is not just a product of the medium, as it was for Chaplin and Keaton. They both spoke in their silent films, as much as anyone else. We simply could not hear their voices. Hulot and Bean live in a world of sounds and voices, but their comparative silence has become a defining feature of their comic personae. Their silence sets them apart, contributes to their eccentricity. But it also makes them sometimes seem odd, even a little creepy.

And where Chaplin and Keaton often made the worlds they inhabited obey their own rules, Hulot's and Bean's world is the same one we all live in, with its own absurd rules, but ones that they must obey - however inadequately - as much as we must. Often, Tati and Atkinson find their comic ideas in their characters' failure to belong in our world, however hard they may try. But watching them try, and try, and fail, and yet still abide in our world, makes it a somewhat more human and more beautiful place.