I know we don’t write a whole lot about comedy here on No But Listen. No, if anything, we’re at the other end of the scale, miring ourselves in the delicious deviousness of the horror genre. But that doesn’t me that we, like any other normal human beings film bloggers, don’t enjoy a little chuckle from time to time too.
Which brings me to the point of today’s article – Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (released in English as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, which I always hear in my head with my dad, family indoctrinator to this movie, and his over-exaggerated French accent, dropping both the “h”-s), the transcendent 1953 comedy from Jacques Tati.
I’m not blowing any film buff’s minds when I bring up how brilliant French director and comedian Jacques Tati’s most famous character, the titular Monsieur Hulot, is – Tati went on to bring him back to star in other iconic and brilliant French comedies like Mon Oncle (a gorgeous retro-futuristic social commentary wrapped up in winsome witticism) and Playtime. Hulot was a movie star for the masses, a clumsy, chaotic, but undeniably charming buffoon who Tati played with an incredible precision and commitment to the bit.
Les Vacances has a premise so simple it just shouldn’t work as well as it does: Monsieur Hulot takes a trip to the seaside for a holiday. That’s it. That’s all of it. It’s a black and white, virtually-silent movie in terms of dialogue, with most of the on-screen noise coming from people pottering around in the background or chatting amongst themselves – on paper, it just doesn’t sound like it should stand up as well as it does, nearly seventy years after it’s first release.
Tati’s incredible eye for the small foibles of human nature is captured in these long, wide shots that capture small interactions, glances, looks – that invite the audience to peer a little closer and spot the small absurdities in human niceties. Beyond just that, though, there’s Hulot himself – Jacques Tati is a physical comedian easily the match of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, enormous and expressive. The limited sound is a feature of the comedy, too, whether it’s the squeak of a stubborn door or a very unfortunate firework incident.
But when I say this film is transcendent, I mean it in the most literal sense possible. I was lucky enough to get to see it at the cinema a few years ago, and the place was filled with the most diverse audience in terms of age that I’d ever seen – kids to pensioners, twenty-something film nerds to teenage couples – and we all loved it. So many comedies end up cursed to stay stuck in the era they were made in, just by the fact of their cultural influences and mores, but Hulot is just so good it transcends. The room was filled with cackles from moment one, and, for a near-silent black-and-white film that’s seventy years old to have that effect on such a wide-ranging audience so many years later – it’s a downright miracle. It’s so different from the comedy a lot of us were raised on, and yet, the way Tati plays with cinematic language and different comedy stylings still scans as well as it did in 1953.
So, yeah, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is still one of the most downright impressive pieces of comedy I’ve ever seen – still connecting with audiences decades after it came out, unencumbered and still brimming with entertainment value and gold-standard comedy. Transcendent is a word thrown around a lot when it comes to art, but this movie actually earns it.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via The Guardian)
No But Listen 