Because of other commitments, this past weekend my family was not able to engage in our traditional Labor Day activity, which is searching for Jimmy Hoffa's body. However, as my family does its own dispirited, pessimistic rentrée, my four-year-old son asked to see one of his perennial favorites: Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday. In Ben's mind Tati's film ranks right up there with the all-time greats: Ratatouille and the Shrek Trilogy. (My eighteen-month-old daughter so far seems indifferent to movies, but she loves to put on Mary Janes and dance to R.E.M.) I don’t know how he came to first see it, but he's seen "the beach movie," as he refers to it, at least twenty times.
Ben doesn't speak French or read English, but he gets every one of Tati's jokes. Lately he's asked me to read the subtitles, but they don't really add much to his understanding, or mine: Two women grumble about an unsuccessful day trip, people exchange pleasantries, a young man reads earnestly from what seems to be Louis Althusser for Dummies. The dialogue is background noise, like the sound of the surf. No matter. Tati's vacanciers are all in their own dream worlds, determined to enjoy their vacations despite the irritations , the indifferent food, and the disruptive presence of M. Hulot.
When he made Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot in 1953 Tati still held a relatively even-handed, forgiving view of modernity. He had not yet developed the acerbic pessimism of Playtime (1967) and Traffic (1971). In Holiday his alter ego putts around the village in an absurdly antique car and struts around in a yokel's hat and a ruminant's pipe. Hulot is largely invisible to the self-important bourgeoisie with whom he shares the Hôtel de la Plage. He catches the eye of a Teutonic beauty who sees through phony sophistication of the local young men who try to impress her with their American jazz records. During an end-of-the season party M. Hulot is the only man who has the grace to dress appropriately, and he's rewarded with a dance with the young beauty. Does their relationship go further than that? Tati is too scrupulous a filmmaker to provide a vulgar hint, yet his anarchic fireworks sequence that punctuates the final evening at the beach, with Hulot unable to extinguish the conflagration he's set off, suggests that maybe M. Hulot's old-fashioned courtliness has won the young woman's heart.
The next day, however, M. Hulot is dejected and alone. Everyone is packing up and returning home. The season has been achingly short. You get the sense that a whole way of life is about to end with it. Really, a way a life had barely begun: the early 1950s were the first time that the general French public had been encouraged to take the annual vacations that now strike Americans as part of the essence of European life. And yet Tati makes it seem as if the ritual dates back to the reign of Henri IV.
This is perhaps why the film holds up to repeated viewing. Its physical comedy appeals to my son, who does a dead-on impression of Hulot falling out of a house while carrying an overstuffed suitcase. Tati's appreciation for the fleeting pleasures of summertime appeals to me. My favorite character in the film is a man who accompanies his wife on a perpetual stroll. They never stop, even though he clearly wants to participate in the dancing and the beach games. He is us, watching, noticing the small things--he's one of the few guests who pay Hulot any sustained attention--and sighing over the fragility of it all. M. Hulot's Holiday was an entirely appropriate send off to the anxious summer of 2008, which has ended seemingly before it began.
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