Return to Tativille

By PETER CALDER

Before there was Mr Bean there was Monsieur Hulot. English comedian Rowan Atkinson has often credited the French master of physical comedy, Jacques Tati, as the inspiration for his hapless hero. And anyone who takes the chance of a lifetime to see the best of Tati's screen creations during the fortnight of the Auckland International Film Festival will find the similarity striking.

The passage of time has been kinder to Monsieur Hulot than one suspects it will be to Atkinson's goofish rubber-faced creation. The latter, extraordinarily funny on first meeting, has gradually become faintly tiresome, like a party guest who refuses to leave. Tati's Monsieur Hulot, by contrast, is a figure who leaves us always wanting more.

Crucially too, he is a figure who seems to have a back story, an element of humanity which extends his life either side of the frame.

"What I wanted to present with the character of Hulot," Tati said, "was a man you can meet in the street, not a music hall character. He does not know that he is being funny."

The thing about Bean, of course, is that he is desperately, muggingly aware of how hilarious he is. The late, great New Yorker critic Pauline Kael - who would doubtless have looked askance at Bean - put her finger on the difference when she praised Tati's technique as "light and dry slapstick; the chronicle of human foibles and frustrations never sinks to the moist or lovable. It is not until afterward ... that these misadventures may take on a certain depth and poignancy."

Hulot - unlike his descendant and ancestors such as Chaplin or Keaton - often gave major gags to minor characters. And - this is particularly true of Playtime but it's a stylistic thread that runs through all his films - he was a film-maker who almost never filled the frame with a single character angling for a single laugh.

He would stage entire scenes in long shot, or at least medium shot, demanding the audience search for gags. Incidents multiply and overlap within the frame: one is paying off in the foreground while another is being set up in the middle distance. It's this - and not just the chance to see the widely praised colour restoration of Jour de fete - that makes it mandatory to see Tati in big-screen splendour.

Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff, on October 9, 1907, in then-affluent Le Pecq in suburban Paris. His father's side was Russian aristocracy; his maternal grandfather was a Dutch picture framer whose clients had included Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh.

He began his entertainment career as a performer in cabarets and music halls, where he pantomimed popular sports heroes (he had showed some promise himself as a rugby player, and the supreme athleticism of his slapstick showcases an extraordinary physical agility).

His first directing project was a short film called The School for Postmen which he reworked the following year into his feature debut Jour de fete. The film was intended to be the first French feature in colour but the process, known as Thomson-Color, was new and risky so Tati shot with a back-up black and white camera as well. The decision proved prudent as he was unable to print the colour film.

Jour de fete struggled to find a distributor but when it finally opened it grossed 10 times its budget and won major prizes in Venice and Cannes, launching Tati's international reputation. His next two features, Mr Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle, were even bigger hits - the former won Cannes' Palme d'Or, the latter an Oscar. But Tati was becoming tired of M. Hulot, his signature comic creation, and conceived of what he called a "democratic film" by which he meant a film without a star, in which the frame was crammed with incident and the viewer's active participation was essential to the film's success.

The result, Playtime, was an enormous gamble. It was shot, in the costly 70mm format, on a set specially constructed on council land on the outskirts of Paris. "Tativille", as it soon became known, had its own power plant and approach road, and a huge building with a working escalator.

The shoot - which eventually ran for more than a year - was dogged by problems including bad weather and delays caused by Tati's Kubrick-like obsession for tinkering (he rewrote scenes to make gags more current). And the finished film - plotless, starless - was the victim of a public backlash. Despite a warm critical reception, Playtime was a commercial failure. Bankrupted, Tati took a decade to recover financially, but professionally never overcame the stigma. His final two features, Traffic and Parade, are widely regarded as his poorest.

For all that Tati, who died in 1982, thought of Playtime as his masterpiece and was in little doubt of his place in cinema history.

"I'm part of the old school," he told an interviewer in the 1970s. "I'm the last one who had the chance to learn in the music hall. That school is now closed. The singers and the sound engineers have taken over."

On Screen

* Who: Jacques Tati

* What: Jour de fete, Mr Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime, and Tati shorts

* Where: Auckland International Film Festival Civic

* When: From Friday.

Film festival programme