Disc Reviews

The Essential Jacques Tati Collection Blu-ray review

• 31st Jul 2014

Just released by StudioCanal is the Essential Jacques Tati Collection, a box set on Blu-ray of all of six of Tati’s feature films and an additional disc with most of his short films. Tati’s cinema career began with a handful of shorts in the 1930s with his first feature film released in 1949: Jour de Fête. His last feature was Parade in 1974 and was originally made for French and Swedish TV but was released theatrically. However, towards the end of his career Tati’s art of mime was already out of fashion and out of date. This art is demonstrated most vividly in his last film, a series of circus performances with Tati and a host of traveling players taking part. What Tati did for cinema was present two enduring icons of French, if not world cinema: the postman (facteur) Françoise in Jour de Fête, a loveable silent type of character if there ever was one and Monsieur Hulot, a character first seen in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) (1953) in four of the six features. Hulot was distinctive with his hat, long pipe, faun raincoat and short drainpipe trousers.

The first film is the aforementioned Jour de Fête, a simple almost silent film (as were most of his films) about an accident prone but genial postman called Françoise. This was the artiste’s first feature film and there are three different versions of this film on the disc. There is the original black and white film released in 1949 that became the toast of the Cannes Film Festival that year. It was always Tati’s conception that the film was going to be in colour but was very dissatisfied with the process. A washed out version with additional colourisation and additional scenes shot in 1961 with an artist wandering through the village and painting his palette in vivid colours was added and released that year. Yet in 1994 restoration work was included by his daughter, Sophie Tatischeff and this seems to perfect Tati’s vision of the film and is and should become the definitive version.

Tati’s second film is technically the only one of the features only in black and white. This is Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. Tati researched and spent a great deal of time studying holidaymakers at a Breton seaside destination and for the first time includes a variety of holidaymakers and types: French provincial and city types, European and American holidaymakers all together. Tati also revived a mime sketch he used to perform from his music hall days: the tennis match. This skit would appear again in Parade.

In Mon Oncle (1958) modernism is shown in vivid Technicolor as he contrasts his traditional and more charming locale with the alienating modernism of his sister’s modern hi-tech home with her industrialist husband. Tati mocks and makes fun of modern day gadgets and is an updating of Charlie Chaplin’s factory in Modern Times (1936), using not such mime and exaggerated gestures as much as funny sight gags (with the sensor for the fish fountain being a consistent sight gag in the film).

Playtime (1967) Tati’s fourth film was his most ambitious, made for almost $1.5. He had a mock-up of a whole new town supposed to represent a new suburb of Paris built on the outskirts of Paris. This was made at both great personal and financial loss for Tati resulting in French President Pompidou having to bail the director out. However, while overlooked for many years, Playtime has proved to be the most enduring and has particularly been re-evaluated since coming out on Blu-ray. Tati’s Hulot falls further into the background with this and his next film and becomes more of a flâneur wandering the city and observing modernist absurdities. This has subsequently proven to be Tati’s masterpiece and his magnum opus.

For his last cinema made feature, Trafic again plunged the artiste and filmmaker into financial difficulties and became a joint French, Italian and Dutch co-production involving a car designer who travels to Amsterdam to show his new design of camper who has a series of automobile related adventures and disasters along the way. The film follows similar themes about modernity and our reliance on and the absurdity of people and their cars but the film feels more detached and colder, even lethargic compared to his previous films.

The last film is Parade. This is a very disappointing last film. Shot on 16mm (compared to 70mm for Playtime), Parade is a very dull film indeed, and dated. It films a performance of Tati in a number of his classic music hall situations with other circus performers in front of an audience. It fails to engage for its 85 minutes and was a sad and disappointing end to a very interesting filmmaker whose first four films are outstanding.

Do Tati’s films stand the test of time? Jour de Fête always does – it is a great way to spend a chilled out Sunday afternoon. The film has a gentle craziness about it that only just seems to break the peace of a sleepy French village. For many viewers, most of the films may take some convincing for none Tati fans. Playtime is one of the most interesting of the films, if not the best for its ambition and on Blu-ray, having been shot on 70mm the film looks outstanding with all its sharp details. Previously released in France earlier this year (the disc first prompts whether you want the French or English edition as soon as you slip the disc into your machine) never has there been such a complete collection. Or has there? In 2009 BFI released a box set, The Jacques Tati Collection all, again beautifully restored but the disc is missing Trafic, his penultimate film; this was available on the Import label. BFI had also released all the films (again apart from Trafic) as separate discs on both Blu-ray and DVD with plenty of extras, commentaries, restoration comparisons and contextual documentaries, but nowhere near as full as the release from StudioCanal. So in a word the StudioCanal release is as definitive as you can get. On top of this each disc has some wonderful contextualizing documentaries and commentaries adding further weight. One of the best is the 80 minute documentary about the making of Jour de Fête, called ‘The American Style’ reflecting the postman’s love of all things American. This is a superb collection and will probably be frustrating to anyone who has purchased the BFI releases in the past couple of years.

Chris Hick