French Fanfare

WSJ: "Hats Off to Monsieur Hulot", by RICHARD B. WOODWARD

The films of Jacques Tati don't square with many other cultural products of postwar France. Released between 1947 and 1974 but unmarked by existential despair or other trends of Parisian intellectual life, his experiments in slapstick and whimsy had more in common with the skits of Red Skelton than the agit-prop pastiches of Jean-Luc Godard.

In retrospect, his work may be seen as an attempt to recover for a humiliated nation the innocence of vaudeville (originally a French word) that older audiences had found in the British music hall and in American silent comedies. Monsieur Hulot, the character he created for five of his best-known films, is one of the screen's endearing oddballs.  (...) >>>

Read more on the current tribute to M. Hulot and its creator at the Cinemathèque Française in Paris, in the WSJ article.

Here's a trailer related to a recent Tati "jour de fête" at Scénovision in Sainte-Sévère sur Indre: