Jour de Fête was the first feature film of the magnificent Jacques Tati and brought him to international attention. It won prizes at both Venice and Cannes and became the toast of film critics everywhere.

Historical Background: Jacques Tati built his reputation as an actor, director, producer, and, most especially, a comic genius on the basis of just five fictional feature films and one quasi-documentary about French cabarets (Parade (1974)). All of his work emphasized physical comedy and sound effects, with a scarcity of dialog and plot. His work is often likened to that of Buster Keaton. Most of his feature length comedies (Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Traffic (1972)) revolved around a recurrent character, Mr. Hulot. Before there was Mr. Hulot, however, Tati had invented another recurrent character, François, the postman, who first appeared in a short, L'Ecole des Facteurs (1947), and then again in Tati's first feature film, Jour de Fête (1949). L'Ecole des Facteurs is included as an extra on the criterion version of Mon Oncle. Nearly all of the comic routines that appear in L'Ecole des Facteurs were reused in Jour de Fête, so the latter can be considered an expansion of the former into a feature length film.

Jour de Fête is the only Tati film with a rural setting, other than a small part of Traffic. Tati was born in 1908 in Le Pecq, France, the grandson of a Russian ambassador to Paris turned art dealer. Tati's experience with the remote French countryside came about as a result of World War II. Before the occupation, Tati was living in Paris, performing his vaudeville act in music halls and cabarets, but when the Germans moved into France in 1942, Tati and a screenwriter friend, Henri Marquet, headed off to the most remote place they could find in the French countryside in order to avoid being shipped off to one of the work camps in Germany. Tati and Marquet settled in the tiny village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre in the very heart of France and took jobs on a local farm. The pair spent about a year there getting to know the people and the way of life. Three years after the end of the war, Tati and Marquet returned to their little village to film L'Ecole des Facteurs. The part of the village postman was loosely based on another actor's part in some film in which Tati had had a bit part. Tati's great strength as a filmmaker was his special gift for observing the comedic elements of human nature, so it's fitting that the postman character should have arisen from observation of a character in another film and Tati's imagining the potential for elaboration. In Jour de Fête, we see the emergence of all of the now familiar Tati techniques: precisely choreographed sight gags, comic mannerisms, an elaborate soundtrack (blending music, sound effects, and ambient sounds), but precious little plot or dialog. Tati doesn't create stories; he simply observes human nature. Although Jour de Fête entails relatively little dialog, it was still more than Tati would ever resort to again.

The Story: For the remote little village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, the annual visit of the traveling carnival is cause for anticipation. As the carnival wagon snakes its way along the country roadway behind a tractor, a child spies it from his bedroom window and races out to skip along behind the caravan while geese and chicken scurry to get out of its way. In the village center, a hunched over, old woman mutters her cryptic observations to her goat about all the commotion. This is the mayor's big day, we learn. He's been planning the details of the event all year, all sketched out in his notebook. The chairs at the town's only restaurant are newly lacquered. The carnival is reason enough for one woman to show off her new Parisian-style dress and for the men to pay a visit to the barber. We can anticipate that the carnival will be reason enough for all to tie on a good bender.

One of the carnival workers, Roger (Guy Decomble) spies the lovely Jeannette (Maine Vallée) in a second-story window. Soon, she's come outside to watch the tents going up and Roger approaches just as the dialogue from a Hollywood western begins to resound from a nearby tent. Roger ambles up looking every bit the part of the cowboy in the dialog, flirting with Jeanette and finally "holstering" his wrench. This little bit of provocative flirtation does not sit well, however, with Roger's wife (Santa Relli).

A problem emerges with the community's attempt to erect its telephone-pole-sized flagpole to mark the occasion. The clownishly incompetent men assigned the task seem incapable of doing the job and as the postman, François, comes peddling onto the scene, it is all he can do not to be squashed as the pole comes crashing down. He has to peddle into the door of a store and somehow ends up on the second floor, much to the proprietor's consternation. François, it seems, is beloved in this small village mainly because his overblown sense of his own importance makes him easy to dupe into misadventures for the entertainment of all. François is quickly enlisted into "supervising" the effort with the flagpole, with humorous results. To his credit, he cleverly maneuvers the cross-eyed man who wields the sledgehammer into properly driving the spikes for the flagpole's base.

The villagers especially enjoy luring François into intoxication by engaging him in "chugging" contests with cognac in which only he is actually swigging the drink down. François is funny enough sober, but all the more amusing when tipsy. The villagers have also rigged up a film in one booth for François's benefit. The phony film combines the audio from a documentary about technological improvements of the American postal service with a video of stuntmen doing daredevil activities involving helicopters and motorcycles. François is shamed by the apparent speed and efficiency of his American counterparts and a bit envious of the obvious adventurous quality of their lives compared to his own. Egged on by the villagers, François becomes obsessed with doing things the American way. The result is a series of amusing vignettes with François racing about at top speed, on his bicycle, delivering letters and parcels in every absurd way that you can imagine. One parcel gets inconveniently dropped under the butcher's cleaver, a letter is tucked underneath a horse's tail, and another pinned to the spike of a pitchfork.

Themes: Jour de Fête was made during the postwar recovery period when the French were torn between genuine gratitude toward America for its contribution to the war effort and liberation and chaffing at their dependence on American aid and the Marshall Plan. The French quite understandably viewed some aspects of the Marshall Plan as economic and cultural arm-twisting. In the arts, for example, the Marshall Plan included a provision that the French import a certain number of Hollywood films. For a country with a long history of national cultural identity and fearful of an excess of Americanization, such a requirement was quite humiliating. So, it was highly appropriate that Tati's ever-so-French film would feature the issue of competing with America and doing things the American way. One character after another cries out, in Jour de Fête, "Here comes François, doing things the American way!" Then François plunges into a river on his bicycle.

The other theme of Jour de Fête became Tati's preeminent theme in his entire oeuvre: the creep of technology threatening to overwhelm our collective humanity, or at least the French part of it. That theme is, of course, related to the issue of American influence, since America has led the way, throughout the twentieth century, in technological innovation and the rush toward a technocratic future.

Production Values: Tati is considered a comic genius and rightfully so. His humor is mostly not the laugh-out-loud variety, at least for me. I found myself smiling throughout this film, but not laughing overtly. It's a humor that pokes gentle fun at the foibles of human nature and our calamities with objects and technology, but it is also a very penetrating kind of insight.

There are three different versions of Jour de Fête that have been produced. Tati originally conceived of the film as a color film. Had he succeeded in releasing the film in color, it would have been the first ever French film in color, but Tati ran into insurmountable difficulties. The color process that he worked with was a newly developed experimental technique called Thomson-Color. It was intended to be the French answer to Technicolor that was revolutionizing filmmaking in Hollywood at the time. Tati had the good sense to use two cameras throughout the filmmaking process, one with the Thomas-Color film and the other with conventional black-and-white. That turned out to be a wise decision because the Thomas-Color film could not be processed after it was shot. Tati was quite disappointed because he had specific plans for the color element of the film. He had taken the trouble to have the doors of the various houses that appear in the film painted gray and to ensure that all of the colors in the village would be dull and muted – until the arrival of the carnival. Then suddenly, the bright colors of the merry-go-round horses, banners, and canopies would spring forth and the entire village would light up in color, a bit like the first appearance of color in The Wizard of Oz (1939). So, it was with great reluctance that Tati finally resigned himself to releasing the film in black-and-white. It took Tati a year to find a distributor, but, in the end, the film was a big success.

Still, Tati could not keep his original concept for the film from ruminating through his mind. In 1964, he generated a re-edited version, which is the one most readily available in America and the one that I watched. The new version provided a newly mixed soundtrack, an entirely new character, and colorization of isolated elements in some of the frames. The added character was a painter. Now, it might seem impossible to add a new character to a film some fifteen years after the film was made, but Tati returned to Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, shot new footage, and integrated it seamlessly. We see the painter first sketching a painting of the carnival in chalk and then, later, painting in colors. Then we see the isolated patches of color in the story itself, which Tati added frame by frame using a stencil. We see the color, for example, in the French flag and on the ornaments of the horses of the carousel.

The third version of Jour de Fête was undertaken by Tati's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, who had worked with her father professionally, helping with film editing. Five years after her father's death, Sophie went back to the color negatives that had been shot concurrent with the black-and-white and over a seven-year period worked diligently to overcome the technical problems that had stood in the way of processing the negatives. Adding to her problems was the unfortunate fact that a few of the color originals were missing. For the missing scenes, she used the black-and-white negatives and a more conventional colorizing process. So, many years after Tati's death, a color version of his film became available and one that we can expect to be reasonably close to his original conception for the film. I cannot speak to the relative merits of the three versions since I've only seen the one. What makes all of this technical background especially ironic is that the issues inherent in the making of the film are pretty much the same as the thematic substance of the film. Jour de Fête is about a French postman feeling the challenge of keeping up with American technological developments but being thwarted in his efforts. Tati tried to introduce a French alternative to American Technicolor but was thwarted in his attempt. This is some kind of freaky variation on the notion of life imitating art.

Bottom-Line: Most of us don't usually accord comedies quite the level of respect that we hold out for great dramas or a skillfully constructed thriller or mystery. We love our comedies, but we often think of them as a way to provide ourselves some frivolous relaxation. Tati, however, truly elevates comedy to an art form. He may not be the only director or actor to do so, but he's one of only a handful. This film is not quite as polished as Tati's later films (at least the two that I've seen so far), but all of his skills are in evidence and well on their way to their later stage of perfection. I highly recommend this film, especially for those who enjoy the likes of Chaplin and Keaton, Monty Python or Peter Sellers. Jour de Fête is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 79 minutes. It is in black-and-white with a few color splotches and is as suitable for older children or teens as for adults – perhaps even more so.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12