(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: A / Audio: A / Extras: C-
Traffic is a car’s default state of life, or so Jacques Tati’s Playtime follow-up would have you believe from its opening shots, of an assembly line in an auto plant framed as a vehicle’s pre-natal jam, locked on a straight road as each unit tags just in front of and behind its clones. Many critics have noted similarities between Tati’s Hulot send-off and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, but this first scene recalls one of that director’s Dziga Vertov Group films, British Sounds, which spoofs the vehicular bottlenecking of Weekend with tracking shots across assembly line floors. But where Godard’s breakdown connoted Marxist deconstruction, emphasizing the exploitation and dehumanization of labor that makes the cars that strip humanity from their buyers, Tati flips the dynamic, ascribing a vague human soul to the cars themselves, sympathizing with them for being trapped, to keep up the metaphor, in an existential cul-de-sac.
The factory belongs to a company called Altra, who are in the process of crafting a ludicrously high-tech camper to send to an auto show in Amsterdam. At the head of the team tasked with the international delivery are American P.R. flack Maria (Maria Kimberly) and camper designer Hulot. As everyone interested in these sorts of things knows, Trafic was a concession to the massive commercial failure of Playtime, not only bringing back the Hulot character whom Tati had outgrown but giving him the first credit, played even before the film’s title. That billing belies how perfunctorily Tati uses his character, silently protesting this compromise by finding ways to shove Hulot into scenes that otherwise have nothing to do with him, most amusingly in a scene where he climbs a tree, slips, and clings to a branch by his feet just so he can be in a shot of Maria fending off the advances of a local lothario.
Tati’s distaste for his iconic figure injects the film with a pessimism absent even from his anxious previous feature, albeit a cynicism capable of accurate insight into social vehicular behavior. A montage of motorists unself-consciously picking their noses laughs at the paradox of shuttling around in one’s private, owned property but always in public, occasionally leading to confused, oblivious vulgarity from those who forget they’re not in the privacy of their own homes (though the touted camper Hulot and co. struggle to get to Amsterdam delivers on the logical endpoint of living out of one’s car).
The director also pulls off an exquisitely organized multi-car pile-up, which impresses not only for its stacked visual quirks—one car sent spinning like a top, another haltingly chasing after its own detached, rolling tire—but for its aftermath, a ballet unto itself in which every driver gets out and makes exaggerated stretching moves to intimate whiplash, each hoping all the others will stop their own faking and rush to their aid. There are even some downright nasty jokes, like a scene of Maria’s dog replaced with a coat by jokesters, who plant the look-alike afghan underneath her tire and give the impression she ran her pet over, sending her into hysterics that Hulot’s silent attempts to clarify the situation, such as stomping on the rug and whirling it about, only make worse.
Trafic is undeniably scattershot, with its setpieces flowing so awkwardly together that it often seems like a collection of thematically linked short films more than a cohesive work, and that’s taking into consideration how light all of Tati’s movies are on connective narrative tissue. But if this was the director’s compromise picture, it’s also proof that he simply couldn’t fail to mount an impressive social critique buoyed by impressively intricate visual humor. Playtime ended with a traffic jam as a giddy carousel, but its successor envisions a world in which we are bound to live out our existence in and around cars. Tati ingeniously identifies them as mobile displays of status, as well as the place where we spend most of our time by agreeing to participate in a mechanized and corporatized society.
Apropos of a film choked with exhaust, its atmosphere is oppressive, and the jokes catch in the throat and sting the nostrils. Even so, Tati lets his winsome energy clear the air at times, though where Playtime made piece with a consumerist world, the best this film can offer is the belief that we can, somehow, survive the world we’ve made. If Trafic can be said to have a happy ending, it’s less because Hulot finally finds companionship than because both are, for the time being at least, ejected from this suffocating rat race.
A/V
Above all, the new transfers of these Blu-Rays emphasize the warmth of Tati’s world, replacing the dim lighting and modest palettes of Criterion’s old DVD for the same bright, greenish-yellow tint of the Mon Oncle and Playtime transfers. While this can clash with the picture’s frequent cynicism, the transfer also maximizes the flashes of spontaneity and chaos that (at least partially) elevate the film out of its vicious mood. At this point, you can just expect the sound on these discs to be nearly perfect in their replication of Tati’s Bressonian soundscapes, and this is no different. This film went back to mono after the basic surround set-up of Playtime, but the sound effects are so dense, you’d be hard-pressed to tell sometimes.
Extras
Trafic is the Tati film most in need of reconsideration and passionate defense, and as such, it’s frustrating that Criterion’s heretofore stuffed set should suddenly skimp on extras. This disc does not even contain all of the extras from the 2008 DVD, though some appear on the set’s final two discs. Instead, the only feature here is one not found on the previous release, a 50-minute episode of British TV from 1976 that mainly focuses on Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday but was conducted late enough to pull a bit from other Hulot films. It’s an odd extra to put here, if only because so little of it pertains to the film in question, though it’s an interesting extra in its own right. Other than that, however, there’s only a trailer.
Overall
Of Tati’s films, this scabrous, disjointed but nonetheless brilliant attack on motorized purgatory is the one that most invites rewatches simply to understand it, not just to bask in its glories. The new A/V is exceptional, but the lack of quality features is an anomaly in this otherwise superlative set that coud have made a case for this challenging feature.