Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1958)

I have fond memories of watching my first Tati film, Play Time, so I was definitely looking forward to seeing what this skilled comic director would deliver this time around in Jour de Fête.

The film centres on a local French postman, Francois (played of course by Tati), who delivers the mail to a small town on his bicycle each day. When a travelling fair visits the town, they show a film about the American postal service, which is just ridiculously advanced. For instance, mailmen jump out of helicopters and planes and ride on motorbikes through rings of fire to deliver their mail. There’s even a segment about the “sexiest mailman” competition and we see topless postman parading on a stage. It is quite amusing and seemed to me like a sarcastic parody of the American “larger than life” Hollywood attitude, where everything is full of action and the mailmen are heroes who have special training on order to be able to deliver the mail to the citizens of America. It also seems to suggest an over-reliance on technology within society − a theme which is continued in many of Tati’s other films, such as Play Time.

Anyway, so Francois sees part of the screening of this film about American mailmen and not surprisingly the townspeople and even he himself, feel that his bicycle method is feeble compared to their American counterparts. So the rest of the film sees Francois attempting to be more efficient and modern when delivering the mail, such as learning how to jump on and off the bike without having to stop the bike.

A story like this sets up the film for a lot of slapstick humour and that’s what we get largely because of Tati’s lanky character, who reminds me of an earlier version of Mr Bean. The start of the film is ok but the arrival of the postman takes it to a new level of entertainment − he injects the humour into the film. A slightly naïve, harmless, clumsy guy, the postman makes some funny expressions. One of my favourite scenes is when the postman “leads” the teams of people getting ready for the fair. His little “ooooooh” at the end just made me laugh out loud − similarly to when I was watching Play Time. Another clever moment was near the beginning of the film, when a guy and girl (who had been giving each other looks) stand in front of one another in silence but from inside the cinema we hear the voices from the film saying things like, “I love you”, etc, and having these off-screen dialogue match what supposedly the couple in front of us are thinking. A minor detail that I also liked was the bees that you can always hear buzzing whenever the postman or someone else rides along a particular road. I was amused that there was this continuity − the postman swats away the bees then later another character passes the same road and does the same thing, adding some physical humour to the story. I really admired the inventiveness of the postman, who at one point, grabs some stationary and letters from the office then when he is on his bike, which is jammed into the back of a truck and stuck there so it moves with the truck. He then sits on the bike and takes out his stationary, using the back of the truck as a desk where he stamps letters in an effort to be more efficient with the mail delivery. Interestingly, at the beginning of the film, we see a grandma walking through the town − she appears throughout and acts as a sort of narrator, providing commentary on what is happening in the background. Strangely. though she is kind of omnipresent, she appears invisible to the other characters, or at least no one replies to her comments, and it isn’t until later in the film when the postman himself travels with her. I also liked the last scene where a boy is walking toward the camera and the truck which is transporting one of the rides from the fair, and as the truck speeds up we see him gradually get left further behind. I think that was a nice finish, marking the ending of this fair and of the fun of the film.

While I did enjoy the film, I felt it started to lag a little in the middle when the postman is drunk at night − coupled with the lack of lighting, I was not as engaged in that scene. Speaking of, it’s worth mentioning how this film was quite technologically advanced for its time. It was filmed with two different cameras − a black-and-white one and a new, more experiential colour camera. The film ended up being developed in black-and-white with some hand-coloured additions by Tati and 1995, the new technology allowed colour restoration.

3.5/5