Tati's Monsieur Hulot - A Malfunctioning Man(?)

French legend Jacques Tati both saw success and failure from his ingenious concoction of Monsieur Hulot that eventually completely enveloped his life. Hulot stood, however, for more than mere comedic relief in postwar France - he was a reflection not only of a man displaced from the world, but also of a world that in itself was unsure of its own identity and trajectory.

It is of no detailed critical analysis to see that Playtime (1967) is incredibly different to the films of Mr Bean - who, as much as I adore him, appears to only have the prime existence to annoy and entertain. One means of seeing this is in the pacing of Atkinson's work as Bean and Tati as Hulot. Mr Bean is explicitly a 'family-film' character whereby there is an issue faced and in typical 'Mr Bean' fashion he goes about the weirdest and wackiest way of overcoming the issue - for example, in Mr Bean's Holiday (2007) Bean is in need of some money and goes about busking to a variety of music genres. There is not a dull moment here, with the film cutting back and forth from one dance move to the next. It appears then that the film does not intend on any sort of reflection or pause, but rather to fill the film to the brim with laughter which contrasts greatly with, say, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) - an obvious direct influence in the title itself of Mr Bean's Holiday. Tati's 1953 piece does not intend to rush gag after gag, in fact one could argue that there are barely any gags in the film at all and it consists more of Hulot wandering blindly from one place to another. Rather than Mr Bean's tidier structure of problem->method->solution (punchline), Tati's Hulot refrains from such systematic comedy and instead shows a problem that is stretched out for a number of minutes which concludes with no method implemented to solve the issue, not any punchline at all - Tati's Hulot on many occasions in all his pictures, I believe it is fair to say, 'blueballs' the audience to anticipate a punchline and said anticipation is where the comedy lies in itself. Rather than giving the audience what they want, Tati's stretched out pacing leave us constantly desiring and in turn allow this space to form that offers a chance for us to dwell on more than Hulot's tomfoolery.

As the title reads, Hulot is indeed a malfunctioning man. I have seen all four of Tati's 'Hulot' films and they all bear the charm of the comedies during the silent-era such as Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and the social relevance of a Roger Waters album. Unlike Bean, where the comedy is concentrated to this almost-alien like character attempting to live within the norms of society, Tati's Hulot can only work alongside this fast-changing world. Where Atkinson's Bean dominates the picture with us unable to take our eye off him, Hulot is intentionally dwarfed by his setting in order to hit home this notion of the 'displaced figure'. Specifically in PlayTime (1967) the camera is often behind Hulot.

Unlike some of Bean's intense framing where we truly see his expressions, Hulot's face is rarely ever given to us (in fact, if I attempt to recall, I can't seem to remember any scene in any Hulot films that actually explicitly show his face and only his face). He is a man that knows not how to act, but how to keep up with a world where everyone looks too quick and does not understand individuality. Again, PlayTime is a fantastic example of this, with the architectural business in the film wanting all leading cities to bear the exact same buildings. In Bean's films, we get the occasional line said by him in that dumb, and confessedly funny, manner he speaks in. Tati's Hulot is silent throughout for not only does he not know what to say but arguably he has nothing to say. In a world where innovation is constantly pushed, he fails to see the need in fixing something that is not broken until his character, in Hulot's last film Traffic (1971), does join such a movement in creating the car of tomorrow - as one would expect, this fails in typical Tati-fashion. This opens a door to looking at My Uncle (1958) in a different light too. Yes, he is commenting on modernity for the sake of modernity but he does so in PlayTime just as well, if not better. My Uncle is rather then a commentary more on the breakdown of family. Materialism exceeding any form of sentimental connection within the household of Hulot's nephew being smartly paralleled with where Hulot himself lives, in a much more rural location where you get a plethora of characters and setting that ultimately add up to create an identity.

Tati's 'Hulot' films in this regard then all contribute not for an audience to laugh at this malfunctioning man but rather to witness the struggle of living in a faceless world. In one of my favourite Hulot scenes, we have these individuals characters of PlayTime all come home for the evening in their apartments and watch TV.

As you can see, their lives are on full display - much like how ours are in this day and age with all the digital platforms created in order for us to craft our own digital identity - yet are all the same. Modernity and image has been implemented at the cost of the wild side in all of us. We have become tamed and thus are all living in the same box - this is understandable though! It makes for easy living for sure, but one cannot help and see the chaos of the party in PlayTime and think "I want a bit of that in my life." The malfunctioning man, Hulot, is a figure to both laugh at and cry with then, with his absurdism working perfectly with his social placing of a time where both everything is what it is expected to be and nothing is what it seems.

~Iman