The Postman

Jour De Fete (1949) is what Jacques Tati was doing before M. Hulot. His character here is the postman of a small French village - the same village getting ready for their festival. He doesn't wear Hulot's raincoat and pipe. He has a Snub Pollard moustache instead. Also, he lacks Hulot's bemused bon ami - here he is self-important and grumpy. But this is still a Jacques Tati movie.

The "plot" is ostensibly that Tati, as the postman, sees a movie about the speed and efficiency of American mail delivery, and is inspired - even though he delivers on a rickety old bicycle. But this doesn't start until well after the midpoint of the movie. The story winds its way around the village, taking its own sweet time, like the postman. He has a tendency to stop and get involved with everything, like the erection of a flagpole in the town square. He also tends to leave these projects in ruins. The folks in town think he's a bit of a nut, and bait him, or maybe that's just their way. They play the old shoe-polish-on-the-binocular-black-eye trick on him (and let him wear the black eye for two days). They get him drunk when he should be delivering mail. And they show him the movie that sets off the last half.

But this is all conveyed with typical Tatian reserve. Some jokes are just observations - successive travelers along a road batting at the air hints at a bee or mosquito - then the postman rides by and crashes trying to swat it. Not a big gag, but sweet.

But I do miss the positivity of M. Hulot. While JdF has the same understated humor of his other movies, it is a bit grumpier, like the postman.

In conclusion, a good companion to The Young Girls of Rochefort?