he last of his four comedies featuring his indelible alter ego Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati's
Trafic serves as a scaled-down but inescapably fitting companion piece to its predecessor, the monumental
Playtime, whose disastrous commercial reception necessitated a smaller, faster-incubating project to keep Tati's movie career alive. But
Trafic doesn't seem to suffer from pandering or artistic compromise; its meticulously framed images are stuffed with the recognizably choreographed chaos, entropic mayhem and long-lens potshots at humanity fumbling with mechanization that are its ringmaster's signature. If
Playtime's enormous scope was visionary, here Tati's tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.
Opening with a montage of chassis, tires and engines assembled at an auto plant,
Trafic finds Hulot employed as a designer of cars for the hapless Altra company, soon to exhibit their latest model at an Amsterdam trade show. (Startling as it is initially to find Hulot as an industrial brain-for-hire, it makes intuitive sense; a mechanical creator's whirring mind could plausibly be powering that eccentric, stutter-stepped lope and gracious clumsiness.) But the new Altra, outfitted for camping expeditions with hideaway extras from a cooking grill to a bed for two, may never reach the show—the dilapidated truck bearing it repeatedly breaks down, then is detained by Dutch police for running a border checkpoint. Tati continually cuts from the repair efforts of the Altra staffers (with American model Maria Kimberly as a PR head who slowly sheds her prima donna tendencies) to the Amsterdam expo, set in a massive hangar-like space populated by odd shoppers, harried staffers and the marooned Altra chief, who impatiently waits in an empty mock-campsite floorspace to the recorded accompaniment of tweeting birds.
Despite the plot,
Trafic isn't essentially a "road comedy," and much of the last third neglects any will-they-make-it suspense in favor of a leisurely respite at a Dutch mechanic's rural house. Tati occasionally uses the auto industry and the highway odyssey of Hulot and his colleagues for setup-and-payoff-structured gags, but the willful self-insulation of motorists is the root of his grand joke; it's not particularly an "anti-car satire" any more than
Playtime was anti-modern-architecture (as Tati argues in the DVD set's extras). Drivers are seen contagiously engaging in nose-picking, yawning, developing physical tics to the swish of their windshield wipers and, after a balletic and mildly violent chain collision, leaving their vehicles to stretch in post-cataclysmic calisthenics. Passing through a service station, they're presented with cheap neoclassical busts as promotional swag. On the road for business or pleasure, they're just trapped bourgeois creatures of habit, like the vacationers or office-dwellers in Tati's earlier films.
Trafic is even less apt than the first three Hulot comedies at provoking big fits of laughter, instead favoring a cumulative, freeform charm, as when a mechanic and a truck driver mimic the light-gravity walk and slowed movements of the Apollo astronauts they've been watching on TV. When Tati does go for an off-road, unspectacular gag, it can be a slightly outrageous camouflage of a baby's bum, or a protractedly cruel dead-dog prank (perpetrated by some slovenly period youths). But if the reduced share of hearty yuks is a fair tradeoff for
Trafic's formalist powers of observation, it can shine with
M. Hulot's Holiday and
Mon Oncle as supporting jewels in its maker's short filmography.
Tati's multiplaned staging of his most ambitious scenes at different points in the visual field registers more easily in the standard squarish frame of
Trafic than in the widescreen format of
Playtime, given the dependably sharp Criterion transfer. The naturally sunlit exteriors look especially pleasing. The restoration of the polyphonic mono soundtrack, with its multitude of post-synched automotive effects (and four spoken languages) serves up Tati's carefully employed sonic environment, though the subtitles may make the dialogue more discernible than intended.
The movie disc is augmented by two TV interviews, one from 1971 with the supporting cast of
Trafic and the other a 1973 show with the director. Actor Marcel Franval testifies that mundane events in the street all seemed eminently filmable once he absorbed Tati's vision. The filmmaker discusses his music-hall background, calling pantomime "the purest means of expression," explains why "real settings" are crucial to his comedy, offers analysis and praise of Chaplin, Keaton and Woody Allen, and leaps to his feet for adroit mimicry of a maitre d' and an entire Legion of Honor ceremony.
In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot, a documentary on Tati's art and life by his daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, comprises the second disc. Making minimal use of narration, it relies on archival footage of his early stage routines, scenes from the sets of
Playtime and
Trafic, and decades of interviews balanced with clips to interpret his style largely in his own words. "I make them look," he says of the audience response to his wide-angle, slow-to-unfold technique; for visual comedy, "dialogue just gets in the way." Whether the paucity of Tati's filmed work—a few variable shorts, five features for cinemas and one for TV—gnawed at him we don't learn, but it is both unsurprising and bracing to learn that he knew exactly what he was doing, something comedic auteurs aren't universally credited with.
Despite Hulot's inefficiency at getting the show on the road,
Trafic is an essential work from one of the movies' great comedy stylists.
