Jacques Tati's finest creation is a masterpiece of democratic comedy: a dense, plot less satire of modern times, in which no single character or joke is allowed to dominate. It's a film that has to be absorbed rather than watched, and seeing it can be like piecing together an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Every choreographed rhythm, every odd visual juxtaposition, hides a gag, but the audience is obliged to scrutinize each image for the hidden pattern or inconsistency (Tati's camera is so impartial that first-time viewers may likely miss half the humor).
The meandering storyline follows a busload of American tourists around an unrecognizable Paris of uniform chrome and glass skyscrapers, moving eventually to a swank nightclub not yet ready for business, where all hell naturally breaks loose. Skirting the periphery is the director's comic alter ego M. Hulot, always at the mercy of his environment and never quite able to follow the upended anthill of activity around him.
In Tati's vision of city life the last vestige of old-world tradition remaining from his earlier 'Mon Oncle' has been totally eradicated, turning the City of Light into a hectic, synthetic metropolis where even some of the inhabitants have become artificial (look close at the background figures during the trade-show sequence). Beginning where the earlier film left off, Tati shows good old-fashioned humanity raising inadvertent havoc in a dehumanized world, with the mechanisms of progress proving to be no match for the unstable influence of homo sapiens, and as always Tati celebrates the (painless) chaos caused by our unsteady embrace of a brave new world.
Time and technological progress cannot be halted, but people, to Tati, will always be people: unorthodox, unpredictable, and gloriously fallible. The humor is often subtle enough to pass unnoticed, all of it choreographed into a dense, busy pattern of rhythmic behavior and creative sound effects, observed as if under a microscope.
The meandering storyline follows a busload of American tourists around an unrecognizable Paris of uniform chrome and glass skyscrapers, moving eventually to a swank nightclub not yet ready for business, where all hell naturally breaks loose. Skirting the periphery is the director's comic alter ego M. Hulot, always at the mercy of his environment and never quite able to follow the upended anthill of activity around him.
In Tati's vision of city life the last vestige of old-world tradition remaining from his earlier 'Mon Oncle' has been totally eradicated, turning the City of Light into a hectic, synthetic metropolis where even some of the inhabitants have become artificial (look close at the background figures during the trade-show sequence). Beginning where the earlier film left off, Tati shows good old-fashioned humanity raising inadvertent havoc in a dehumanized world, with the mechanisms of progress proving to be no match for the unstable influence of homo sapiens, and as always Tati celebrates the (painless) chaos caused by our unsteady embrace of a brave new world.
Time and technological progress cannot be halted, but people, to Tati, will always be people: unorthodox, unpredictable, and gloriously fallible. The humor is often subtle enough to pass unnoticed, all of it choreographed into a dense, busy pattern of rhythmic behavior and creative sound effects, observed as if under a microscope.