(Part of The Complete Jacques Tati)
Distributor: The Criterion Collection
Release Date: October 28, 2014
MSRP: $124.95
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Film: B / Video: B- / Audio: C / Extras: C

So thorough is Criterion’s Jacques Tati box set that its disc of short films consists mainly of work Tati did not direct. On demande une brute (Charles Barrois, 1934) has an amusing premise—Tati plays an actor who answers a call for a “violent role,” only to discover he has been entered into an actual ring fight with a muscular brute—but unfortunately, its big fight feels like many early sound films, an ideal silent made leaden by the demands of the new technology. The talkiness in general clashes with Tati’s sensibilities, and only a sequence in which the actor sups with his wife and she accidentally serves herself from the fishbowl instead of the soup pot has any of the wit you might associate with the filmmaker.

Jacques Berr’s Gai dimanche (1935) edges closer to Tati as we know him, with him paired with the clown Rhum as two tramps trying to make a dollar by staging countryside tours in a rundown vehicle that seems to run on sheer will. One of the best gags involves the doors of the passenger car never shutting properly, with two more popping open every time one is closed, sending the two hucksters running about trying to get all sealed before running into each other. Soigne ton gauche (1936), directed by the great René Clément, is the standout of Tati’s pre-directing shorts. Opening with a postman (not Tati) spiraling down country roads in shots the director would later crib for his debut, the film soon reveals itself to be about boxing, not mail delivery, with farmer Roger (Tati) watching a training boxer and imagining living such a life.

Shots of Roger shadowboxing in a barn, even celebrating his imagined victory, are pure Tati, and Clément’s gift for graceful escalation produces a number of great sight jokes, as when Roger is pulled into a sparring match and surreptitiously thumbs through a box on how to box just before he has to get the stuffing knocked out of him. The film, half the length of the preceding two, is twice as efficient, playing upon Tati’s fleet-footedness for a match that’s closer to a dance. The resolution, in which the ring collapses and Roger uses the debris to throw the boxer off his game, is so well-done, and so deftly edited with each punch, that it feels almost radical for the time. (Jean-Luc Godard would even name one of his later films, Soigne ta droite, after this short.)

Tati directed 1946’s L’école des facteurs (“Postman School”), and it’s obvious that he used most of the material for Jour de Fête. The film is almost as elegant as the Clément short, but the action is more restrained than what appears in Tati’s feature debut, restricted early on to the classroom where an officious teacher (voiced pitched abnormally high) forces the prospective postmen to practice even the simple act of handing over mail. The short blends the slow and fast tempos that occur separately in Jour, which renders Tati’s bike ride hilariously disjointed.

During the production of Playtime, that film’s assistant director, Nicolas Ribowski, made the short Cours du soir, in which Tati plays an acting instructor to a class of bourgeois, suited men who are eager to learn but lack the observation and empathy needed to truly act. At one point, Tati even pays a clip of a stage rendition of his L’école des facteurs to demonstrate to the students, a delightful bit of self-reflexivity. This lightweight film is nonetheless the finest late showcase for Tati’s simple, poetic miming outside of Parade, and it’s a wonderfully intimate companion piece to the epic being made at the same time.

The final two shorts come from Tati’s daughter, Sophie Tatischeff. Dégustation maison is a delightful short, made in the same seaside town where her father shot Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, but Tatischeff displays her own style throughout. Set in a café serving treats made with gin and wine, the film hangs out with the place’s regulars as they consume tarts and start to get progressively more drunk. Where Tati’s sound design minimized the importance of voices to attain universality, Tatischeff layers the patrons’ conversations into a miasmic din, perfectly capturing the feeling of being in a small restaurant as all the isolated patter builds to a roar. Tatischeff splits credit with her father on Forza Bastia, which she completed after discovering his half-edited reels in 2000. The film is a straightforward documentary of crowds gathering for a soccer match between France and the Netherlands, albeit filtered through Tati’s preoccupations with modern society. Traffic jams and nationalistic tchotchkes abound, but Tati indulges in the fans’ giddiness, ignoring the claustrophobic of so many bodies converging on one space to celebrate such a unifying act.

A/V

Each of the seven shorts was given a 2K restoration, but naturally, the quality varies wildly. The early, Tati-starring shorts are all over the place: One demande une brute is irreparably damages, with lines present in nearly all frames along with scratches and soft textures, but Soigne ton gauche looks as good as Jour de fête, no doubt aided by the preservation its popularity afforded it. The color shorts look stronger; even the 16mm footage of Forza Bastia has comparable color depth and detail to the 16mm scenes of Parade. Sound is likewise up and down, but even when its muffled and distant, there’s no doubt that extensive clean-up has been done.

Extras

After contributing so many video essays, Stéphane Goudet shows himself in “Professor Goudet’s Lessons,” another essay enlivened by interspersed scenes of Goudet himself delivering a lecture in a frantic, clumsy manner not dissimilar to Hulot. Goudet also has an older extra from 2002, “Tati’s Story,” that provides a more general overview to the specificity of his monographic essays on the individual films in the set. Finally, the actual box set comes with a booklet containing essays from Jonathan Rosenbaum, James Quandt, Kristin Ross, and David Cairns.

Overall

This excellently sourced compilation of Tati appendices is the final treat of one of Criterion’s all-time great releases.