With Jour de Fete, French genius Jacques Tati began exploring many themes that littered his quite wonderful career. The plot is, like many of his works, very simple and is centred around one very basic idea - here the bumbling postman Francois, played by Tati. The small rural town of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre is visited by a travelling fair, who bring joy and colour to an otherwise quiet area. Francois goes quietly about his business under the nose of the village-folk who hardly seem to notice him, apart from when they're making fun of him or getting him drunk. After seeing a documentary showing the advanced methods of postal delivery in the U.S., Francois makes use of everything around him to make his own service as fast and efficient as in America.
Clocking in at only 70 minutes, this is certainly Tati's least ambitious project, but he was very much honing his craft (this was his directorial début . His reputation as the Antonioni of slapstick is evident, as Tati feels just as comfortable watching the simple and natural interaction of the village's inhabitants in the quite beautiful rural landscape, as he is falling on his arse. Tati barely appears for the first twenty minutes or so, which is relatively laugh-free, but these early scenes are important in understanding the point of the film. By having such a calm and naturalistic opening, Francois' desperate struggle to meet the demands of a society relying increasingly on technology becomes all the more ridiculous. And there lies the satire, something that he explored more head-on and ambitiously in Playtime (1967).
Not to say Jour de Fete is without ambition, as Tati was so dedicated to his craft that he shot the film on two cameras - one with standard black-and-white photography that was the norm in 1949, and one with Thomsoncolour, a quite primitive and experimental colourising process. Thomsoncolour went bust before the film was released, and Tati was forced to release the black-and-white version that circulated for years. Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff and cinematographer Francois Ede managed to release the film in it's original colour in 1995, but the film looks grainy, damaged and diluted. Yet it's nice to think that Tati thought his work and vision was too grand for black-and-white, and he's right. Although this is by far the least laugh-out-loud of Tati's work that I've seen, there is plenty here to hint at the genius to come, namely the quite brilliant final few frames that has an excited child running after the leaving fair, gradually shrinking in the distance.
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