Jacques Tati’s Trafic is a comedy gem that tends to get lost in the shuffle. Setting aside the tendency for this thing to be mistaken for a similarly titled but completely unrelated drama a about drug smugglers (that extra “f” makes all the difference in the world) the 1971 swan song for Tati’s “Monsieur Hulot” character was poorly reviewed on its original release. Compared to the other Hulot films it is a curiously narrative effort by Tati—although the film’s languid Tati-esque pace caused contemporary reviewers to miss that aspect.
Critics have a tendency to describe Hulot’s debut, M. Hulot’s Holiday, as being the narrative one, but that’s never made sense to me. Holiday has the barest reed of a premise: a socially maladroit fellow goes to a beachside resort and annoys/inspires his fellow vacationers. That’s about it. Supposedly there’s a subplot of his romantic interest in Nathaloie Pascaud’s character, but that’s an egregious misuse of the word “subplot.” Yes, he shows an interest in her, and she in him. That’s all. And that’s not a plot.
Mon Oncle is even looser—there’s a rudimentary skeleton of a structure built around the idea that Hulot’s brother-in-law tries to get him a job, he does poorly at it and is fired, and then he leaves town. That’s at least a proper story, with a beginning, middle, and an end—but it’s accounted for in about four scenes, and the rest of the film is gloriously digressive and hilarious and utterly unconcerned with the scraps of a plot that appear in those four scenes.
Playtime is the loosest and least narrative of them all, and it is also the comic masterpiece of its decade. Why tell a story when you can sketch out a mood and a place, and riff endlessly off the satiric ambience of it all?
And then comes Trafic.
Hulot is now gainfully employed at a job he is apparently rather good at—designing cars. His latest creation is a tricked-out camper van, and his car company wants to debut the prototype at an upcoming trade show. So, Hulot and his team of engineers pack up with an American PR representative to transport the vehicle to the tradeshow floor—only to be caught in an endless series of misadventures and complications that prevent them from arriving until after the show ends.
Not only is that a more coherent storyline than anything Tati had offered up to that point, but more significantly the setup is such that nearly every scene in the film relates to that central idea. There are occasional digressions into the absurdity of car culture as a general concept, but the majority of the film keeps its eye on the ball.
That’s not to say any of the proceedings feel any less than fully Tatified in their comic worldview. One of my favorite bits comes when Tati’s truck runs out of gas, and he trudges off across miles of farmland with the empty gas can in hand, headed (he hopes) for a gas station—only to meet a fellow traveler with an empty gas can in his hand coming from the opposite direction. It’s a simple, wordless, physical joke—seen in wide shot, there’s no need even to see Hulot’s reaction. The existential defeat is obvious enough when the two men spy each other and recognize their shared mission, and the realization that neither direction is going to provide what they need.
Another perfectly Tati-esque joke occurs at the preparation for the car show. The organizers have cleared out a massive warehouse, and marked out the available space for the various booths and exhibits by stretching twine between pegs at about ankle-height across the floor. So, when one exhibit official wants to relay an urgent message to another, he can’t simply walk across the vast empty open floor to get to him, because despite appearances it isn’t empty space. Tediously, he has to step over endless little hurdles of string to painstakingly make his way across the floor—in Tati’s world, people are always making life needlessly harder on themselves.
There is one misstep, though, a joke so crude and awful it’s hard to credit. Hulot backs a car over a girl’s fur-lined jacket in such a way as to convince him, and everyone else, that’s he’s run over the PR lady’s little dog. I mean, of course, he hasn’t, and the entire history of Tati’s comedy is built on visual rhymes and the act of mistaking one thing for another… but still, the idea of making a joke about killing an innocent animal seems unnecessarily cruel.
More satisfying is the scene in which Hulot and his engineers show off the prototype van to some incredulous policemen—the van is exactly the kind of absurdly overcomplicated Rube Goldberg-like device that Tati would invent, yet is also a wry comment on the kinds of poorly-thought-out contraptions that car companies actually do try to foist on people.
If the world needs someone to invent ludicrous contrivances, it could do worse than ask M. Hulot to do that. And to Tati’s credit, he found a finale for his famous alter ego that provided a happy end to a misfit outsider without being untrue to his misfit outsider ethic.
