Jour de fete
With Jacques Tati, Paul Frankeur, Guy Decomble, Santa Relli, and Maine Vallee.
In 1942 Jacques Tati was living in occupied France. The grandson of a Dutch picture framer whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, the 34-year-old Tati had played rugby, performed in music halls, and acted in a few short comic films. That year he left Paris with a screenwriter friend named Henri Marquet in search of the remotest part of the country they could find, hoping to escape recruitment as workers in Germany. They finally settled on a farm near Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre, located in the dead center of France–not far from where George Sand had entertained such houseguests as Chopin, Liszt, Flaubert, and Turgenev–and spent a year or so getting acquainted with the village and its inhabitants.
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Three years after Germany’s surrender, Tati and Marquet returned to the village to make a short film, L’ecole des facteurs (“The School for Postmen”), in which Tati played Francois, the village postman, who delivers the mail on a bicycle. (Francois was based loosely on a bit character played by someone else in a comic short Tati had acted in ten years earlier.) L’ecole des facteurs was Tati’s first directing project, and the following year he and Marquet returned with different cinematographers but the same basic crew to rework and expand the short into a feature, Jour de fete, whose brand-new color process, Thomson-Color, would make it the first French feature in color.
How an additional character could compensate for the absence of a full-color image is an intriguing puzzle. But Tati’s compositional strategy was an intrinsic part of his genius, making him a worthy grandson of van Gogh’s framer; he was an instinctive artist with an uncanny sense of how seemingly unconnected aspects of a film could connect with one another. (Interestingly enough, this sense corresponds to Carl Dreyer’s stated reason for using four rhyming intertitles in his last feature, Gertrud, intertitles that were later removed. Dreyer had hoped to shoot that film in color and told an interviewer that had he succeeded, those four intertitles–none of which made any reference to color–would have been unnecessary.)
None of this would matter quite as much, of course, if Jour de fete weren’t already a masterpiece by one of the key figures in the history of cinema. The film has always been a charming populist favorite–at least when people could discover films on their own, without expensive ad campaigns to limit their choices. But its restored color version is doubly precious: this is color that truly looks like 1947–not films of that period so much as 1947 itself–and its bucolic postwar euphoria, not to mention its affection for interactive village life, has all the fragrant perfume of a time capsule. (For comparably paradisiacal views of village life mixed with dollops of wry social criticism, I can only think of a few John Ford items, like Judge Priest, The Sun Shines Bright, and The Quiet Man.) Thomson-Color looks distinctly different from every other color process, and the fact that we have virtually no other color record of French life during the 40s gives Jour de fete the force of a revelation.
To appreciate Tati’s ambivalence about this matter in all its complexity, one has to see Jour de fete in a specifically postwar context, where genuine gratitude toward Americans for helping to liberate France weighed against the cultural and economic bullying imposed by the Marshall Plan–which included a quota of Hollywood pictures, some of them in Technicolor. (Late in the film, a cycling Francois manages to run two American MPs off a country road by pretending to bark orders over a telephone, in a parody of American-style efficiency.)
