Jour de fête (1949)
Directed by Jacques Tati

Film Review

Arrival of a comedy Titan

The biggest cinema hit at the French box office in 1949, Jour de fête marked the arrival of one of the country's most iconic performers, Jacques Tati.  Monsieur Hulot, Tati's most famous creation, was still a few years away, but in François le Facteur, a likeably inept Mr Bean-like rural postman, we have a comedy caricature that is every bit as distinctive and memorable - and his more than passing resemblance to a certain Général de Gaulle is of course entirely coincidental.  This was not Tati's first brush with fame.  In the 1930s, he had been a star of the Parisian music hall, appreciated for his immense talent as a mime artist.  His act consisted mainly of 'sporting sketches' in which he would serve up hilarious comic imitations of boxers, horse jockeys and tennis players.  Tati made his screen debut 15 years before he filmed Jour de fête in Jack Forrester's (now lost) Oscar, champion de tennis (1932) and appeared in a few other short films in the '30s, most successfully in Soigne ton gauche (1936), directed by his friend René Clément.  Interestingly, this film opens with a country postman cycling across a rural landscape, making an immediate connection with not only Jour de fête but also the short film that Tati directed and starred in immediately before this, L'École des facteurs (1947) - a film that Clément would have directed if he wasn't already preoccupied with making La Bataille du rail (1946), his first feature.

By this time, Jacques Tati had gained valuable experience as an actor, having appeared in notable minor roles in two films by Claude Autant-Lara - Sylvie et le Fantôme (1946) (where he played the ghost) and Le Diable au corps (1947).  Before this, the esteemed director Marcel Carné had him lined up for the part of Baptiste Deburau in Les Enfants du paradis (1945), until the more experienced actor Jean-Louis Barrault committed himself to the role.  Interestingly, this film's producer was Fred Orain who, in 1946, teamed up with Tati to create the film production company Cady Films.  This company produced not only his first three feature films - Jour de fête (1949), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon oncle (1958) but also the 15 minute short L'École des facteurs.  It was the latter film that set Jacques Tati on the road to national and international stardom after WWII.

An affectionate homage to the golden age of silent comedy (1910-1925),  L'École des facteurs is a dizzying non-stop compendium of visual gags that allows Tati to honour not only France's greatest comic performer - Max Linder - but also the comedy giants of early American cinema that he inspired - Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  The popularity of this exuberant short encouraged Tati and Orain to commit to expanding it into a feature-length film entitled Jour de fête.  This was in early 1947, when the French economy was still languishing in the doldrums and film production in France had dwindled to an historic low.  If there was one thing that could be relied upon to buck up the mood of a chronically depressed nation, Tati's deliriously funny first feature would surely be it.  The film's trailer effectively promoted it as the pick-me-up medicine which the country desperately needed to get back on its feet after years of penury and gloom.

The times they are a-changin'

The principal location for both L'École des facteurs and Jour de fête was Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, a small rural town in the heart of the idyllically picturesque Berry region of central France.  It was an area that had great significance for both Tati and his assistant director Henri Maquet, as the two men had hid out here for several months in 1943, staying at a farm to avoid being deported to Germany as forced labourers under the Service du travail obligatoire (STO) initiative introduced by the Vichy government in 1942.  (This was part of a wider plan imposed by the Nazis on their occupied territories to obtain manpower to undertake work in Germany after its own workforce had been vastly reduced by conscription into the armed services.)  Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre serves as far more than an eye-pleasing backdrop in Jour de fête.  The quintessentially Gallic agricultural setting embodies perfectly the traditionalist view of France that Maréchal Pétain invoked in his appeals to his nation during the Occupation  years (summed up in his famous slogan Travail, Famille, Patrie).  In his film, Tati implies that this quaint romantic image of France is doomed to become a thing of the past as the forces of modernity (unstoppable advances in technological and cultural progress) exert an ever greater control over people's lives.

The welcome arrival of a fair in a behind-the-times little town can be interpreted in many ways (including Germany's take over of France in 1940 and the Allied invasion in 1944) but, in view of Tati's later work, it most likely symbolises the sudden incursion of the modern world (à l'américaine) into the old French way of life after the war.  The film ends in a highly ironic vein with its hero - François the postman - pitchforking mown hay into a cart whilst a young boy goes chasing after a trailer loaded with fairground paraphernalia.  François's apparent reversion to Pétainist ideals calls to mind a short film that Tati had made in 1938 - Retour à la terre - and appears to be somewhat sarcastic, as the future of France is surely far more accurately captured by the final shot of a child happily chasing after a truck stuffed with goodies, as apt a metaphor for the encroaching consumer revolution as you can imagine.

The drastic and often dehumanising influence of modernising trends on French society is a theme that would become central to Tati's oeuvre in his subsequent films - reaching its fullest expression in his world-renowned masterpieces Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) - but already it is quite noticeable in his early films.  L'École des facteurs brilliantly satirises the obsession with ever-greater speed and efficiency that was beginning to take root in France at the onset of the consumer boom following the Second World War, and Jour de fête takes this idea further, to ludicrous extremes, as its central character attempts to model himself on the US mail service (with predictably hilarious results).

Resistance is futile

At the time Tati was shooting the film (between May and November 1947) France was fully signed up to the Europe-wide programme of American-led reconstruction that (in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich) allowed the United States beneficial trading conditions in return for hefty financial support in the rebuilding of the smashed continent.  It was the Treaty of Alliance drawn up between France and the newly created United States in 1778 that had first established a close bond of friendship between the two countries.  In 1945/6 the entente cordiale was vigorously renewed with no less mutual love and gratitude on both sides, although this time it was France that was in hock to its far more powerful and wealthier brother nation.  The power imbalance was one which the US exploited ruthlessly, sowing the seeds for much anti-American sentiment in later decades.

The Blum-Byrnes agreements between France and the United States (signed in May 1946) cleared France's historic debt obligations (which ran to almost three billion dollars), on condition that the country relaxed import controls and allowed the US unprecedented access to all of its markets.  The French film industry was particularly adversely affected by this deal, as it stipulated the relaxation of a rigid numerical quota on the number of foreign films that could be screened in cinemas in a year.  As a result of Nazi censorship, a backlog of over 2000 American films had accumulated and these suddenly became available for screening in France, at a time when French film production had slumped to an all-time low.  Concern among the intellectual elite that French cinema could well perish under a deluge of inferior American imports was what led to the creation of the CNC (le Centre national de la cinématographie) in October 1946, although this did little to stem the tide of cultural assimilation as the French public's love of all things American was by now well and truly established.  An early sequence in Jour de fête showing children running towards the trailer laden with the fair attractions evokes memories of French people happily rushing to greet the GIs during the Liberation (receiving presents of cigarettes and chocolate in return), but it also serves as a potent visual metaphor for France's willingness to fully embrace American culture after the war.

Things can only get better

Jour de fête was made just as the pangs of France's postwar austerity were beginning to give way to the pleasures of a sustained consumer boom that would last thirty years and totally transform the country as it embraced American fashions, tastes and technological developments - losing a substantial part of its own cultural identity in the process.  It is this dramatic transformation that Tati comments on with his idiosyncratic pathos-tinged humour in his remarkable series of films from Jour de fête (1949) to Trafic (1971).  These enchanting cinematic gems are chock full of subtle but poignant observations on how greatly society and individuals are altered by a whole host of modernising influences that they are powerless to resist, influences that are supposed to make life easier but merely have the effect of turning people into badly functioning machines.  In most of Tati's films, it is his alter ego Monsieur Hulot who observes these changes and acts in a way that suggests disapproval, frustration or sadness.  In Jour de fête, this role is taken by a bent old woman dressed in black who wanders around accompanied by a goat.  At one point she remarks: 'The more progress there is, the more misery there is.'  For her, progress never seems to improve matters.  It only results in even greater confusion and unhappiness.  She cannot make any sense of François's mania for delivering mail more quickly.  'Rapidité! Rapidité!' the postman cries as he zips around town like a human tornado, minimising human contact as he hurls letters and parcels at people without stopping (a model that the big online retailers and mail delivery companies would fully adopt half a century later).

'What's the point of getting bad news faster?' is the gist of the old woman's reaction to this seemingly pointless innovation.  The film's final shot - of the boy running after the departing fair trailer - is a perfect metaphor for society's obsession with innovation - change purely for the sake of change.  This is how Tati appears to see his fellow countrymen as they pursue one empty fad after another, everyone succumbing to the siren-call of the consumerist juggernaut that promises well-being and contentment in neat shiny packages but merely engenders an ever-growing craving for more 'stuff' that distracts us from the things that really matter in life.  Tati's view of a world cheerily surrendering to the crass vulgarities of materialism is playfully mocking on the surface, but underneath there is a profound sense of melancholy and regret.  This is not how things should be.  Surely real horses that can neigh and gallop across open fields are more appealing than painted wooden replicas that merely turn in circles on a merry-go-round?  Yet it is the latter we go running after, lured by the promise of something new.

Haut en couleur

The irony is that Tati himself was not immune to innovation.  If things had gone to plan Jour de fête would have been one of the first French films to have been seen in colour.  At the time, colour film photography did exist and had been used in American cinema since the late 1930s - most notably on such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).  However, the tried and tested Technicolor process was prohibitively expensive (especially in Europe, where processing laboratories were few and far between), so cheaper alternatives were considered in France in the 1940s.  One such system was Rouxcolor, which had been employed (fairly successfully) on Marcel Pagnol's La Belle Meunière (1948).  Another was Thomsoncolor, which Tati chose for his first feature.  This was a variant on the Keller-Dorian lenticular (additive) process in which the camera lens is fitted with a segmented filter comprising thousands of tiny elements that allow the red, green and blue components of an image to be captured separately on a single piece of black-and-white film.

Tati's camera operator Jacques Mercanton had little confidence in the untried system and advised the director he should make a simultaneous black-and-white recording of the film.  It proved to be good advice, as it turned out the colour footage was unusable, forcing Tati to release the film in its standard monochrome format.  For a filmmaker as obsessively perfectionist as Tati this was a major disappointment and he continued tinkering with Jour de fête in the early 1960s.  Pochoir (stencilling) was used to add patches of colour to certain elements within a shot and additional colour sequences with a new character (a painter narrating the story) were inserted.  This revised piebald version was released in 1964.  In 1988, six years after the director's death, his daughter (and editor on his last three films) Sophie Tatischeff teamed up with the cinematographer François Ede to begin a meticulous restoration of the 'lost' coloured version of Jour de fête.  The work took many years to complete and it wasn't until 1995 that the film was released as Tati had originally envisaged it, as part of France's centenary celebrations marking the birth of cinema.  All three versions of Jour de fête are now readily available on DVD, although the one that has most appeal is undoubtedly the original black-and-white version, which is stunning in its recent digitally re-mastered form.  The Tatischeff-Ede full colour version is worth watching but the viewing experience is somewhat marred by the inferior definition and unnatural-looking colours which give the film a washed out, yellowish look throughout.

The natural heir to Max and Charlot

Jour de fête is an extremely astute piece of social commentary but it is also a delightful tribute to the golden age of silent film comedy.  This universally popular art-form was a natural progression from the music hall comedy routines of such stars as Little Tich and took off in France in the 1910s through the comic genius of Max Linder.  In the guise of the top-hat wearing 'gentleman Max', Linder became an international superstar with a series of short films that were phenomenally popular the world over.  Whilst his career was short and ended in tragedy, he had a massive influence on the early comedy legends of the nascent American film industry, none more so than Charlie Chaplin, whose iconic Tramp was inspired by his social superior Max.  Tati's early career as a comic mime artist owes as much to Linder as to the American comedy giants that followed, and he was virtually alone in carrying the art of purely visual comedy into the sound era - first in his short films of the 1930s, and then in the films he subsequently directed and starred in from his directorial debut (L'École des facteurs) in 1947 to his last film Parade in 1974.

François le Facteur is Jacques Tati's funniest comic creation, one that combines aspects of Chaplin's sympathetic Tramp (known to the French as Charlot) and Keaton's stony-faced goon.  He is a likeable and believable character but he is also hopelessly accident prone and a tad self-important.  In his starched uniform and with his stiff, condescending airs he is every inch the kind of inept authority figure that the French love to laugh at.  In one scene in Jour de fête, the postman is seen watching the town band perform in the square from the vantage point of a first-floor window.  Seen from the back, with his right hand raised in respectful salutation, François is a dead-ringer for Général de Gaulle, who was by this time a figure of fun after his failure to make a big political comeback in the spring of 1947.

François's mania for American-style efficiency is a pretty gratuitous dig at France's craze for all things American after the war.  With just about every country in Europe scrambling to rebuild itself after the devastation of WWII, the United States was seen as a beacon of modernity offering a way of life that was irresistibly more attractive. The consumer boom that began to take off in the late 1940s brought greater material comfort but, as Tati implies in his films, at the price of a breakdown in social cohesion and an abandonment of long-cherished traditions.  (Other prominent French filmmakers made the same observation in their films, none more so than Marcel Carné.)  One result of this supposed 'progress' is a drastic pruning of the threads connecting individuals to one another and to society in general - to the point that real human connection becomes virtually impossible (a point well-made in Tati's last important film, Trafic).
 
Whilst Tati does employ a few recognisable professional actors in the film (Paul Frankeur and Guy Decomble) most of the characters on screen are non-professionals recruited from the region where the film was shot.  Tati preferred working with non-professionals as he could coach them to deliver precisely the effect he wanted.  He would begin by miming each character in turn and then getting his rookie actors to imitate his mime as closely as possible, often shooting scenes many times until he achieved the desired result.  Most of the gags in Jour de fête are of the kind you would expect to find in a classic Chaplin or Keaton comedy - some are perhaps a little over-laboured and lacking in pay-off, but others are highly inventive and capable of reducing any audience to hysterics.  François's well-meaning attempts to erect a flagpole in the town square are comically frustrated by his being repeatedly smacked in the face whenever he treads on a rake - an object to which his feet appear to be magnetically drawn.  His efforts to show off his garden hosing skills to all and sundry are just as laughable and end in his suddenly dropping through an unseen hole in the ground (pride always comes before a fall).  The sequence where François fails to mount his bike because a fence has inexplicably appeared between him and it is pure Chaplin, and the one where the postman goes chasing after his bike as it goes off by itself is one that not even Keaton could have improved on.  The film's two best gags are lifted wholesale from L'École des facteurs.  The first depicts a nasty encounter with a level crossing that appears designed to ensnare bicycles, the second shows the enterprising postman doing his office chores 'on the go', after docking his cycle with a moving truck.

Visual comedy works better with sound

Even though Jour de fête is a predominantly visual film, with dialogue playing a very minimal role in telling the story, sound is an absolutely crucial part of its design.  The sound elements which Tati employs - everyday sounds, diegetic background music, snatches of (mostly incomprehensible) dialogue - are skilfully integrated with the visuals to lend the film its unique atmosphere and heighten the impact of the numerous gags.  Some of the jokes simply wouldn't work without sound - an example of this being the scene in the post office where François is heard smashing objects out of camera-shot in an adjacent room as his unconcerned colleagues go about their business in the foreground.  In another scene, a love-at-first-sight encounter between Guy Decomble's character and an attractive local woman is helped along by dialogue from a film being screened in a nearby cinema tent.  The promising love affair is nipped in the bud when the film suddenly breaks down and the intended lovers fail to find the words to continue their romantic rencontre.   Music plays an important part in holding the film together and preventing it from resembling merely a disjointed succession of unconnected sketches.  The tension between tradition and modernity is lyrically expressed in Jean Yatove's continuously jaunty score, which becomes increasingly American in feel as the film gallops through its rollicking grande finale.
 
Beginning a convention that Jacques Tati would employ on all of his other films, the dialogue spoken by his characters is only intelligible in parts - most of it is hard to make sense of and tends to blend with the rich palette of background sounds making up the aural landscape.  Tati's intention was to place his audience at some distance from the situations depicted on screen, according with Chaplin's famous comment that 'life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but comedy in long-shot.'  This accounts for why Jour de fête was filmed mostly in long-shot, with characters appearing fully within the frame as they would do on stage, employing exaggerated gestures and mannerisms for heightened comic effect.  Tati's subtlety lies in other areas - primarily his mise-en-scène, which shows a scrupulous attention to detail.  It is way beyond the capability of any viewer to take in every gag in a single viewing of a Jacques Tati film or to fully appreciate how carefully they are constructed.  This is why these films remain so fresh and funny no matter how often you watch them.  There is always something new to discover and be enchanted by in Jour de fête - it is one of those exceedingly rare films that never go stale, never lose their charm.

Make 'em laugh

Once he had completed work on Jour de fête towards the end of 1947, Tati had some difficulty finding a distributor.  It was so unlike any other film of the era (a time when cinema was dominated by glum melodramas and depressing war films) that it was considered a highly risky proposition.  Michel Safra and André Paulvé's DisCina came to the rescue and reaped a handsome reward when the film finally made it to French cinema screens in May 1949.  The film proved to be the most successful French film of the year, attracting an audience of 6.8 million in France alone.  Critical reaction to this oddball comedy may have been mixed but it still managed to pick up two notable awards - the Grand Prix du cinéma (France's highest film accolade) in 1950 and the Prize for Best Screenplay at the 1949 Venice Film Festival.   In 1961, Tati capitalised on the film's enduring popularity by creating a sketch using content from the film at the Olympia, Paris's best known music hall.  This was part of an attempt by him and other notable performers (including the iconic singer Édith Piaf) to save the venue from closure.  Before and after the show, Tati appeared in the foyer to mingle with paying customers in the guise of Monsieur Hulot.

Jour de fête was Tati's most successful film, although his subsequent Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958) fared almost as well, each drawing an audience of around five million.  Alas, this success did not extend to the director's most ambitious film Playtime (1967), which proved to be a spectacular commercial failure and resulted in a humiliating bankruptcy.  Today, almost a century after he made his screen debut, Jacques Tati is considered one of the great icons of French cinema.  The leading directors of the French New Wave, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard considered him one of the finest examples of a film auteur and professed to being influenced by him in their own work.  Tati's films are still widely seen and continue to bring joy and amusement to audiences in every corner of the globe.  With its astute commentary on human beings' susceptibility to fads and fashions, Jour de fête is no less relevant today than it was back in the late 1940s when it was first seen, but what makes it such an enduring classic is its effortless, totally unbridled sense of fun.  No other French film has brought so much laughter to the world as this timeless and unique comedy delight.

Film Synopsis

It is 14th July and the arrival of a travelling fair in the sleepy French country town of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre is greeted with enthusiasm by the locals, especially the children.  Distractions of this kind are few and far between in this picturesque rural backwater, where nothing ever seems to change and life ambles along at its sluggardly pace in step with the dawdling rhythms of nature.  For, François, the amiable but pompous country postman, the fair's arrival has a momentous impact.  After managing to get himself blind drunk (with some help from the mischievous fair owners Marcel and Roger), François has his eyes well and truly opened when he sees a film proclaiming how much better the Americans are at running a mail service.  Speed and efficiency - these are what today's forward-thinking Americans expect from their postal system, and this is what François now intends to deliver, once Roger has planted the idea into his muddlesome head.

The next morning, our intrepid hero wastes no time putting his new ideas into practice, zipping down the quiet country lanes as fast as he can pedal on his trusty bicycle.  The administrative chores that François previously undertook in the office he now carries out whilst he is on the move, using the back of a truck as an improvised desk.  How he now scorns his silly old habit of stopping for a chinwag on people's doorsteps!  Just think of all the time he can save by dodging the chitchat and dropping off letters and parcels without breaking his lightning pace!   To the postman's surprise, no one seems to appreciate his greatly improved efficiency.  An old woman berates him with the comment: 'What good can coming of delivering bad news more quickly?'  In the end, François only succeeds in wearing himself out.  Exhausted and drenched after accidentally tumbling into a river he makes his way back into town on the back of a cart.  Seeing a family struggling to load newly mown hay into their cart François decides to offer his support.  He hands his mailbag over to a young boy who runs off to complete his round.  As he does so, the boy catches sight of the trailer taking the fairground attractions away from the town.  Excitedly, he hastens after the departing vehicle, with no hope of ever catching up with it.