Yoyo

While Tati seemed to love performers this film abuses them, its seriously unfunny. The actors are fine but they are treated shoddily. The film maker seems to want to denigrate live performers. It's inventiveness is not enough salvage it's integrity.. Check out any Tati movie and compare the framing the narrative and the characterization to appreciate how trite this film is by comparison. Oddly it was made AFTER Tati's heyday. One would hope something had been learned. French satire by its very nature is somewhat lame, but this is embarrassing. It's as though Germany had won in 1871 and infected European story telling.

The films of Pierre Etaix are pretty much unknown today, having been tied up in a legal dispute for decades. It was finally resolved in 2007, and they've been restored and reintroduced within the last few years (Criterion's nice box set was released in 2013). Yoyo is perhaps the best regarded of them. It is a fine French comedy. Somewhat reminiscent of Tati, but it has its own charms. Etaix stars. At first he plays a lonely rich man in 1925 (it opens as a silent film), who uses his extravagant wealth to distract himself from missing his true love (Claudine Auger), a circus performer. She returns with his clown son, Yoyo, in tow. After the stock market crash, Etaix joins his girl and their son in the circus act. The film soon skips ahead to WWII, where Yoyo, now an adult clown (also played by Etaix) entertains troops and hopes for better times. The plot on this one is very loose, and the comedy's not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it is very amusing and entertaining throughout. It's also quite lovely at times. It seems that this Etaix person is an actual discovery.

Utterly charming homage to silent movies, with little dialogue but lots of sight gags, and an energy reminiscent of the era. Its playful story begins in the chateau of a wealthy man in the 1920's, and as it shifts focus to the man's son and marches through to the 1960's, it lampoons the rich, finds humor in the Depression and war years, and pokes fun at modernization. There are themes of wealth not buying happiness, how fickle fate can change one's fortunes in an instant, and how life can recur in some ways from generation to generation, this last point emphasized by Pierre Étaix playing both father and son. It's very light in tone, but there is a tinge of melancholy despite all its humor. I loved the little tributes to Fellini, Chaplin, Keaton, and Groucho Marx, and the cinematography was beautiful too. It was probably strongest at the beginning and it felt a little slow in places, but it kept me smiling throughout.

I'm 47. It's genius. I have no other words, to say them would be a disservice.

OK my review didn't pass the quantity test: I have to write more lines otherwise I can't submit this.

Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" has burnt indelible images into my mind, so did this film.

This film also bought me joy. It's very beautiful, very very funny and at times very sad.

It's highly stylised throughout, each period of the story is depicted through the cinema conventions of that period (somewhat). The stylisation continues through highly over-exaggerated but incredibly musical sound design and almost no dialogue.

The cinematography is stunning, the direction and editing are stunning, the performances are excellent throughout.

I may be alone in thinking that this is one of the greatest films but please make your own judgement, I'm happy.

This movie was on TCM the other evening and I am glad I caught it. Host Robert Osborne explained that it was tied up in litigation for many years and has had little TV or theater exposure. Coincidentally, it was at the Film Forum in NYC in April, along with 3 other films of director/star/writer Pierre Etaix.

As mentioned in my title, he borrows heavily from both Tati and Chaplin, and it is a very successful blend of both. He has lots of clever sight gags of the kind Tati sprinkled liberally throughout his films, as well as the prolonged kind of skit favored by Chaplin. But whereas Tati's characters are primarily two-dimensional, Chaplin's are often fleshed out with heart, and the humor contained sometimes comes with a tinge of pathos. Etaix combines the best elements of both masters and the result is a very thoughtful brand of comedy which draws the viewer in like a vortex.

I only recorded this one, but I wish I had recorded the others. His is a unique type of humor which comes with an emotional ingredient I had not seen before in film comedy. It is presented as a mini-saga, for lack of a better term, of a boy who grows to manhood trying to earn enough to restore his father's château. His mother, a circus acrobat, had become estranged from his father years earlier and retained custody of the boy. More than 40 years elapse during the film and Etaix plays both the father and, later, the boy grown up.

A reviewer above mentioned that Etaix displayed genius. I would like to see more proof but the reviewer is on the right track. "Yoyo" is a special film from a gifted filmmaker which will touch your heart as comedy rarely does.