Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

James Arnold So far, this is the only Jacques Tati movie I've seen. It's extremely visual. It looks great. In particular, the opening of the film and the movie's final major act are wonderful to watch. A few scenes show characters being swallowed up in massive sets and environments. The shot gets wider and wider, an approximation of how insignificant each of the characters are to those around them. Such shots are stunning in their beauty.Most of the comedy in Trafic is visual as well. I normally like wordplay, but I ended up liking Trafic's visual humor as well. For example, two workers are installing a sign for an "auto show", and one instructs the other to rotate the giant letter "O" before putting it up. Yet the O is perfectly round and looks the same at any rotation. Most of the comedy is from similar workplace incompetence and inefficiency. Much like a real workplace, there's nobody in the movie pointing out how ridiculous everyone is acting. The satire isn't mean-spirited; Tati isn't implying that workers are lazy or stupid, just that sometimes we end up behaving foolishly.A scene in the middle reminds me of Saturday Night Live, during its creative peak. Customs inspectors are suspicious of a prototype camper car, so its salespeople have to explain all of its features. This includes an electric razor inside the steering wheel, an extendable bed, a trunk-mounted shower, and a grill that seems to use heat from the engine. It's absurd and brilliant, and I've only listed some of the car's features. The inspectors aren't always convinced: hands having been squirted by the built-in soap dispenser, an official requests to have the soap analyzed. Anyone who has seen Charlie Chaplin's movies will see shades of his characters in Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot -- he changes a tire with extremely exaggerated, rhythmic alternation between crouching and standing.All of the humor, both visual and spoken, translates excellently from French (and there is some English in the movie anyway), although one joke about a gas station giving out trinkets will only be fully appreciated by audiences who were alive when gas stations still did this (before the 1970s?). I think it compares very easily to "Airplane!" or The Naked Gun. In contrast to The Naked Gun, Trafic is more deathly serious despite being hilarious. Part of the comedy is playing "what's wrong with this picture?", and sometimes it's really hard! If you miss the jokes, or have to have them explained, you won't find the movie as funny.96 minutes long is the perfect length for this movie. It conveys the annoyance of waiting for a roadside mechanic or being late for an event, without forcing viewers to watch in real-time. There are plenty of jokes throughout the film to keep the audience's attention. Despite being called "Trafic", you're not going to see any metropolitan gridlock here. The movie happens *because* of some cars, but most of the movie is not *in* a car.Full disclosure: I watched this along with around 15 other young people in a film comedy class. I liked it far more than any of the other students, who found it to be either: occasionally smart but mostly boring, or entirely boring.

roy I enjoyed this film after I figured out that it was 'not' a comedy! This is static art, sort of, but more like mime, the kind of mime that is intended to make you laugh, in order to get your attention, in order to be what it actually wants to be, sentimental, cranky, entertaining without seeming to be willing to admit that the whole point is a cry to 'look at me', the same desire as is at the base of every film, but this film's intention is less well disguised, maybe intentionally, maybe the evident vulnerability is in fact the attractiveness of the piece.At some point I stopped following the dialog, and started 'watching' the movie, like a painting, one of those paintings on a curtain that keeps going on and on (what are they called? something 'dromes'). It may seem too explicit, the human hands mimicking the windshield wipers, et al, but if you can stop seeing the literalness, then there is something there, or at least there would have been in 1971, which I remember so well, driving the autobahn, tooling through the circles at 100 clicks, watching the colors go by.

Terrell-4 What can we make of Trafic, Jacques Tati's last film? It certainly isn't a major success, as M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle are. It's not a gallant failure, as I believe Playtime is. It seems to me that it is a sad, sometimes amusing combination of those things that made Tati so unique, so funny, so problematic and so drawn to making mundane social commentary. There must be something in the water we drink or the bread we eat that causes some humans with extraordinary artistic gifts to believe that because they are great artists they also must have equally great gifts of social philosophy, gifts which they are determined to share with us. By the time Tati made Trafic, four years after Playtime, he had lost ownership of his life's work, his films, and most of his money. Playtime was a debacle. He spent a fortune, his own as well as others, to craft a perfectionist's dream of artistic control. He ended up with a movie that was filled with surprises, layer on layer of -- for wont of a better term -- sight and sound gags, with fascinatingly complex amusements for an audience willing to let the situations develop around them, and seemingly endless, obvious and often impersonal visual commentary on the homogenizing of modern society and the perils of technology. Most moviegoers were not all that interested. Now, with Trafic, Mr. Hulot has come back. He is a designer for a Paris auto company, and he has developed a camping vehicle like no other. Trafic is the story of Mr. Hulot's delivery of his camper from Paris to an international auto show in Amsterdam. It's a long journey filled with misunderstandings, accidents and crashes, a PR executive with an endless number of dress changes, cops, windshield wipers and a lot of cars. The movie is as exquisitely built as an expensive vest pocket timepiece. Unfortunately, time has a way of catching us up, and Mr. Hulot now is a man past middle age, where male innocence seems unlikely and somewhat unattractive. Tati was 64 now, and he looks it. The gentle, innocent mime who meets unexpected personal situations at a small seaside hotel or tries to help his young nephew has been replaced by a well-meaning older gentleman we more often observe than we root for. His encounters with the clichés of faceless technology and bumbling bureaucracy are increasingly with people with few understandable, sympathetic foibles. Mr. Hulot to be at his best needs people we can come to like and interact with, not simply interchangeable stand- ins...even if they're picking their noses in the privacy of their cars (in a sight gag probably only Tati could have pulled off). Mr. Hulot only appeared in four feature-length movies. It is Tati's genius that in less than 500 minutes he gave us such a memorable and appealing human being. Tati's layering of sight gags is unique and often intensely and unexpectedly funny. With Trafic, however, I found my interest more intellectual than anything else. There were stretches of the film that simply weren't all that engaging. And this, of course, is all just opinion.

edwartell Jacques Tati's final film shows his frustrations with modern progress, and car congestion in particular. Suffice it to say that on a trip from Paris to Amsterdam every possible problem a car could encounter short of absolute destruction is suffered by poor Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) and his traveling group. The humor and pacing of the film is very French; that is, a bit slow to American sensibilities. Regardless, the film is oddly compelling even when nothing more than a traffic jam is seen. The gags are sometimes hilarious. Watching this English-dubbed video on a TV is a frustrating experience, since one suspects that it would be much more interesting on the big screen (because of the somewhat monotonous nature of the images), which is not an option. A worthwhile watch, but definitely not TV-friendly. Not Tati's most accessible film.