Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Better than most people think

Best movie ever!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Trafic certainly isn't the last film by Jacques Tati, but it sure is the last successful and well known one. Mostly because it is his last film with his standard character, Monsier Hulot. After Trafic Tati still directed the television Sweden-France co production Parade (1974) and started making the sports-documentary Forza Bastia, which his daughter, Sophie Tatischeff edited and finished in 2002. But I personally like to see Trafic as his last film, as his cinematic legacy.The plot of Trafic is very simple; Mr. Hulot, car driver and the PR girl have to take a new car to an exhibition in Amsterdam. They arrive few days late - the only actual exhibition is at the customs. The world of Jacques Tati is full of gags, he doesn't spend much time with his stories, but he writes his gags for years. And the pleasantly surprising thing is how the gags are made - they aren't taken too far, as they often are in comedies of today. Dozens of events happen at the same time, dozens of people get in these and by coincidence they come across with each other.The destruction of old core values and habitat have been common themes for Jacques Tati. But in Play Time (1967) and Trafic (1971) he goes far deeper in the mechanization of life. Play Time showed us the futuristic Paris cursed by globalization. It would be too superficial to see Play Time simply just as a satire of urban living and modern society. In Trafic we see that Tati doesn't build that big a difference between urban and rural living. People come across with same kind of situations, troubles and madness. I think Play Time is his highest achievement and it's so much more than just a satire about modern society. In Play Time's postmodern Paris and in Trafic's highway the individual finds the very same challenges.Trafic is basically a satire about mass industry - cars are built and built so long until the consumers are satisfied, which will never happen. This is the age people live their lives with avarice. Just as Mon oncle so is Trafic about consumer hysteria - the customs scene is a great example of this. The mechanization of life is the main theme in Play Time and in Trafic - in Trafic, once again, the customs scene is the greatest example of this, but it can be seen in just about every scene. For instance the randomness of relationships, which is a reflection of the twisted relation between work and the mechanization of life.

I enjoyed this film after I figured out that it was 'not' a comedy! This is static art, sort of, but more like mime, the kind of mime that is intended to make you laugh, in order to get your attention, in order to be what it actually wants to be, sentimental, cranky, entertaining without seeming to be willing to admit that the whole point is a cry to 'look at me', the same desire as is at the base of every film, but this film's intention is less well disguised, maybe intentionally, maybe the evident vulnerability is in fact the attractiveness of the piece.At some point I stopped following the dialog, and started 'watching' the movie, like a painting, one of those paintings on a curtain that keeps going on and on (what are they called? something 'dromes'). It may seem too explicit, the human hands mimicking the windshield wipers, et al, but if you can stop seeing the literalness, then there is something there, or at least there would have been in 1971, which I remember so well, driving the autobahn, tooling through the circles at 100 clicks, watching the colors go by.

What can we make of Trafic, Jacques Tati's last film? It certainly isn't a major success, as M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle are. It's not a gallant failure, as I believe Playtime is. It seems to me that it is a sad, sometimes amusing combination of those things that made Tati so unique, so funny, so problematic and so drawn to making mundane social commentary. There must be something in the water we drink or the bread we eat that causes some humans with extraordinary artistic gifts to believe that because they are great artists they also must have equally great gifts of social philosophy, gifts which they are determined to share with us. By the time Tati made Trafic, four years after Playtime, he had lost ownership of his life's work, his films, and most of his money. Playtime was a debacle. He spent a fortune, his own as well as others, to craft a perfectionist's dream of artistic control. He ended up with a movie that was filled with surprises, layer on layer of -- for wont of a better term -- sight and sound gags, with fascinatingly complex amusements for an audience willing to let the situations develop around them, and seemingly endless, obvious and often impersonal visual commentary on the homogenizing of modern society and the perils of technology. Most moviegoers were not all that interested. Now, with Trafic, Mr. Hulot has come back. He is a designer for a Paris auto company, and he has developed a camping vehicle like no other. Trafic is the story of Mr. Hulot's delivery of his camper from Paris to an international auto show in Amsterdam. It's a long journey filled with misunderstandings, accidents and crashes, a PR executive with an endless number of dress changes, cops, windshield wipers and a lot of cars. The movie is as exquisitely built as an expensive vest pocket timepiece. Unfortunately, time has a way of catching us up, and Mr. Hulot now is a man past middle age, where male innocence seems unlikely and somewhat unattractive. Tati was 64 now, and he looks it. The gentle, innocent mime who meets unexpected personal situations at a small seaside hotel or tries to help his young nephew has been replaced by a well-meaning older gentleman we more often observe than we root for. His encounters with the clichés of faceless technology and bumbling bureaucracy are increasingly with people with few understandable, sympathetic foibles. Mr. Hulot to be at his best needs people we can come to like and interact with, not simply interchangeable stand- ins...even if they're picking their noses in the privacy of their cars (in a sight gag probably only Tati could have pulled off). Mr. Hulot only appeared in four feature-length movies. It is Tati's genius that in less than 500 minutes he gave us such a memorable and appealing human being. Tati's layering of sight gags is unique and often intensely and unexpectedly funny. With Trafic, however, I found my interest more intellectual than anything else. There were stretches of the film that simply weren't all that engaging. And this, of course, is all just opinion.

Jacques Tati's final Hulot film concerns an attempt to get a camper car from Paris to the Amsterdam car show. Its Hulot on the road.Made in the wake of the disastrous reception of Play Time this was Tati pretty much doing a contract work to get some money. The result is a less refined film than either of his previous two films, much of the film being less precise gags and set pieces, rather its the insanity of just getting from here to there. Filled with people this is possibly the most alive of the four Hulot films. There are what passes for close ups and we we see everyone as individuals and not merely as ants marching in sterile environments. Its a real world film something none of the preceding Hulot films really is.For those who have seen the three previous films this is a film where details are filled in. Where Mon Oncle had Hulot looking for a new job, here we see the one that he finds, working in auto design. We also get to finally see his ever present umbrella opened. Most interesting is the fact that there is perhaps a hint of romance or if not real romance the sense that he is not an isolated human being. This is the film where the character finally comes to life as something more than a character.For many people this is a lesser Tati film. It doesn't have the ideas of the previous two films. Outside of the camping car there is no real set piece to make your intellect marvel. The film is not a mediation of grand ideas, there are some, but when you get down to it its a comedy. A real laugh out loud comedy that is almost the exact opposite of Play Time where most of the humor brings smiles but not belly laughs.I think its a very good film. Certainly its not his best, I would have to say that would be Hulot's Holiday since it mixes the intellectual humor with the belly laugh. This I would probably put as second simply because I genuinely laughed repeatedly at this film, something I didn't do with Mon Oncle and Play Time. I think a good argument could be made for the film being better than its reputation (The laughs, the sense of life and people, and even the lack of pretension). I will agree its not a great film, it does suffer from the meandering that Play Time and Oncle have, but it is a funny one.If you like any of the earlier films see this movie. If you like funny comedies I also suggest you try this film. It may not go down as your favorite film but I'm pretty sure you will laugh at it, which is all I think it was ever designed to do.