Advertisement

The Kindness of a Comedic Stranger

Share

In a recent story about Steve Martin’s new movie, “L.A. Story,” film critic Roger Ebert said Martin “is like those screen comedians of the past--Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati--who did not depend on violence, embarrassment and the put-down for their laughs, and instead just simply put genuinely funny things on the screen.”

Keaton is familiar to most of us, if only by name and that unforgettable stone face. Finding Americans familiar with Jacques Tati, however, usually is as tough as pinpointing a mobile Scud missile launcher.

Why? That’s one of life’s great mysteries--at least to anyone who has ever fallen under Tati’s delightful spell. Fortunately, new opportunities arise periodically to discover the works of this influential French director, writer and comic actor. One arrives tonight, when two of Tati’s comedies will be shown at UC Irvine.

Advertisement

Tati, who died in 1982 at age 73, made only five feature films over a period of 20 years after World War II. Despite his low productivity, he earned a place in film legend for his absurdist, yet humane, view of the foibles of modern man and woman.

His alter ego in these films is M. Hulot, a lovable bumbler who first appeared by name in the 1953 feature “Les Vacancers de Monsieur Hulot” (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), which screens tonight along with its 1958 follow-up, “Mon Oncle” (My Uncle).

(A spokeswoman at UCI’s film studies department, sponsor of the free screenings, said original-language films with subtitles will be shown, rather than partially dubbed prints that have popped up on videotape. In any case, like Keaton and Chaplin’s, Tati’s use of dialogue is almost incidental--his visuals are universal.)

Compared to most contemporary film comedies, Tati’s brand of humor is what Cole Porter’s music is to heavy metal: gossamer delicate, warmly sophisticated, intricately constructed, yet seemingly effortless.

There’s no better entree to Tati than “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” which opens with a warning akin to that supplied by Twain for “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: Viewers are advised to avoid searching for anything resembling plot or moral.

The film, as light and delicious as a souffle, revolves around the all-too-human antics of a dozen or so characters on summer vacation at a picturesque--but hardly exclusive--seaside hotel.

Advertisement

The tone is set quickly--harried French families gather at the railway station to begin their holidays. A voice, rendered incomprehensible by the malfunctioning public-address system, announces arriving and departing trains at various tracks, to no one’s avail.

Once passengers are aboard, whisking through the countryside in the utmost speed and comfort that modern technology has to offer, we get our first glimpse of Hulot--or, rather, of his antiquarian automobile, a jalopy that gets run off the road by anything more powerful than a pony cart.

Other motorists, in their blind-eyed rush toward relaxation, impatiently blast their Queen Mary-like car horns at a dog peacefully sleeping in the road; Hulot’s horn bleeps at the mutt with all the ferocity of a timid ewe.

That basic kindness permeates Hulot’s world--a mischievous boy at the beach turns his magnifying glass from the sand to an overweight sunbather, but only to create a mild disturbance. Other filmmakers would have the man burst into flames and expect audiences to explode in guffaws.

Tati/Hulot, though, revels in life’s silly little moments: a quasi-attentive taffy maker who very nearly lets his livelihood get away from him; an odd-duck couple who have found a certain kind of peace through a three-paces-apart marriage; a waiter who seems secretly to delight in the lilting “thong!” sound made by the dining room’s swinging door.

In “Mon Oncle,” this eye for the curious detail in life shows up in the click-clacking of a modern housewife’s heels across a sparkling linoleum floor; the gush of water from a front-yard fish sculpture; the yielding squish of a Naugahyde chair in the office where Hulot applies for a job with his brother-in-law’s company.

Advertisement

Ten years after “Mon Oncle,” Tati returned to the screen with “Playtime,” a less-frequently shown film in which comedy was still the thrust, although his message--about obsessively technological culture suppressing human interaction--had grown considerably darker.

In these two from the ‘50s, the attitude is strictly wide-eyed wonder and amusement that anyone ever could opt for sterile formality and efficiency over good old, down-to-earth messy human feelings.

“Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” and “Mon Oncle” by Jacques Tati will be screened Saturday starting at 7 p.m. in Humanities Hall, Room 178 at UC Irvine, Campus Drive and Bridge Road, Irvine, as part of the college’s “24 Frames Per Second” alternative film series. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-8596.

Advertisement