Soigne ton gauche (1936)
Directed by René Clément

Film Review

Many years before he became a world famous cinema icon through his Monsieur Hulot films, Jacques Tati made his screen debut in a number of short films in the 1930s in which he put his talent for visual comedy to good use.  Of these, the best known is Soigne ton gauche, a 12-minute long boxing skit which owes something to Buster Keaton's Battling Butler (1926) and Laurel and Hardy's The Battle of the Century (1927).  The film was one of the first and most atypical films to be directed by René Clément, who would go on to to have an extraordinarily high profile career from the mid-1940s, winning accolades and attracting massive cinema audiences with such films as La Bataille du rail (1946), Le Père tranquille (1946), Jeux interdits (1952) and Plein soleil (1960).

Jacques Tati not only takes the lead role in Soigne ton gauche, he also supplied the script, and in both areas he gives us a tantalising foretaste of his subsequent comedy triumphs - Jour de fête (1949), Les Vacances de monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon oncle (1958).  At the time, Tati was a popular stage comedian, with a particular flair for mime and mimicry.  The film features one of his most successful pre-WWII stage routines, that of the boxing fanatic taking on an imaginary (or possibly invisible) opponent.

This may not be vintage Tati, but Soigne ton gauche features some side-splitting sequences which makes it a hugely entertaining and memorable short film.  You wonder why Tati took so long to make a name for himself in cinema, when he shows such obvious talent for slapstick and has such an engaging screen persona (the comparison with Keaton is a fair one).  The film's closing scene, with the comical country postman cycling off into the distance, seems to presage Tati's first notable work as a director, L'École des facteurs, made a decade later.

Film Synopsis

On a farm somewhere in rural France, a sports coach is training two boxers for a forthcoming match when disaster strikes.  One of his boxers is knocked out during a training bout and, to continue training the coach needs to find a replacement - fast.  He notices a young farmhand, an obvious boxing enthusiast, miming a boxing match by himself in a barn, and persuades him to enter the makeshift boxing ring.  With only his enthusiasm and a teach-yourself book to help him, the farmhand throws everything he has into the phoney boxing match.  With a little help from the village postman and his cronies, our hero pulls off a spectacular victory, only to land an unexpected blow from his mother...