This movie is really pretty amusing. Amusing -- not outrageously, belly-busting, iconoclastically hilarious. Jacques Tati is not that kind of guy. He's too much the affectionate and good-natured observer (and exemplar) of human gaffes.
It's a French movie but it might as well be in Esperanto because there's hardly any dialog, and none at all that adds anything of consequence to the comedy. You can tell from the very beginning. A small knot of people packing luggage and tennis rackets is waiting at a train station. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker but it's unintelligible, distorted by electronics, a monotonous drawl of indistinguishable vowels -- "Mwarrrr rooohm rahhhr raaahr RAWRRRRR." The crowd dashes to an underpass staircase and disappears, only to emerge from another staircase near the camera. "Ra-rawwwl mwahh lawrr braah", announces the loudspeaker. The crowd quickly disappears underground and pops up again at its previous location.
Much of the comedy comes from sound effects. The swinging door of the beach-front hotel's dining room makes a curious "pong" when it closes. M. Hulot's tiny 1924 convertible with its skinny tires makes the tinny, erratic sound of a half-sized motor-driven lawn mower.
The visual gags are pretty funny too. The innocent and helpful M. Hulot is being pursued because of some misunderstanding and is compelled to pause in the chase, or dash from his hiding place, to catch a large glob of sagging taffy before it can touch the sand.
But it's all gentlemanly. And all of Jacque Tati's subsequent films were equally gentle. There is no equivalent of Chaplin's Mack Swain, the huge, black-eyed, evil gorilla who can bend street lamps with his bare hands. There are no burglars. No poverty. No social comment at all. Simply the tall, stiff figure of the fundamentally decent Tati with his queer Robin-Hood hat and his pipe stumbling through the complexities of human interactions with as much delicacy as he can muster. Never angry. Never really ashamed. Never dirty or immoral. (The most challenging incident I can remember from any of his films is an opening early morning scene in which dogs trot into the town square from different directions and they all pee on their favorite trees.) "M. Hulot's Holiday" has another virtue, which seems to have been captured almost by accident. An old and somewhat grainy black and white movie, it evokes the feeling of being on vacation at the beach. You can almost feel the sand and smell the sea. Or that might just be me, remembering the glorious summer beaches of my youth in Atlantic Highlands.
There isn't any real story, and little continuity in the gags. There are moments when nothing much is going on, or, when something is going on, it doesn't deserve the amount of screen time it gets. You could get up and treat yourself to a bathroom visit and when you returned you probably wouldn't have missed much.
I think, though, it helps to be in the right mood to enjoy this to its fullest extent. If your mind is foggy, if you're nodding out, this isn't going to wake you up.
It's a French movie but it might as well be in Esperanto because there's hardly any dialog, and none at all that adds anything of consequence to the comedy. You can tell from the very beginning. A small knot of people packing luggage and tennis rackets is waiting at a train station. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker but it's unintelligible, distorted by electronics, a monotonous drawl of indistinguishable vowels -- "Mwarrrr rooohm rahhhr raaahr RAWRRRRR." The crowd dashes to an underpass staircase and disappears, only to emerge from another staircase near the camera. "Ra-rawwwl mwahh lawrr braah", announces the loudspeaker. The crowd quickly disappears underground and pops up again at its previous location.
Much of the comedy comes from sound effects. The swinging door of the beach-front hotel's dining room makes a curious "pong" when it closes. M. Hulot's tiny 1924 convertible with its skinny tires makes the tinny, erratic sound of a half-sized motor-driven lawn mower.
The visual gags are pretty funny too. The innocent and helpful M. Hulot is being pursued because of some misunderstanding and is compelled to pause in the chase, or dash from his hiding place, to catch a large glob of sagging taffy before it can touch the sand.
But it's all gentlemanly. And all of Jacque Tati's subsequent films were equally gentle. There is no equivalent of Chaplin's Mack Swain, the huge, black-eyed, evil gorilla who can bend street lamps with his bare hands. There are no burglars. No poverty. No social comment at all. Simply the tall, stiff figure of the fundamentally decent Tati with his queer Robin-Hood hat and his pipe stumbling through the complexities of human interactions with as much delicacy as he can muster. Never angry. Never really ashamed. Never dirty or immoral. (The most challenging incident I can remember from any of his films is an opening early morning scene in which dogs trot into the town square from different directions and they all pee on their favorite trees.) "M. Hulot's Holiday" has another virtue, which seems to have been captured almost by accident. An old and somewhat grainy black and white movie, it evokes the feeling of being on vacation at the beach. You can almost feel the sand and smell the sea. Or that might just be me, remembering the glorious summer beaches of my youth in Atlantic Highlands.
There isn't any real story, and little continuity in the gags. There are moments when nothing much is going on, or, when something is going on, it doesn't deserve the amount of screen time it gets. You could get up and treat yourself to a bathroom visit and when you returned you probably wouldn't have missed much.
I think, though, it helps to be in the right mood to enjoy this to its fullest extent. If your mind is foggy, if you're nodding out, this isn't going to wake you up.