Director and actor Jacques Tati made his last appearance as Monsieur Hulot in "Trafic", released in 1971, around 18 years after his first appearance in "Les Vacances de M. Hulot" ("Mr. Hulot's Holiday"). In between those cinematic bookends, his famous tan raincoat and well-worn brown hat got plenty of wear, along with his umbrella. In "Trafic", Tati, who had tackled the perplexities of modernism in "Mon Oncle" and "Playtime", sends Hulot into the heart of the auto industry. Somehow it seems appropriate that a culture that gave us flying CItroens with hydropneumatic suspensions (see above) would also give us an offbeat perspective on the car industry itself...
It may be significant that in French back then, trafic signified some kind of racket or illicit trade. The English meaning of traffic was connoted in French by la circulation. In the title shot above, graphic designer Michel Francois signals the director's focus on the automobile's often zany effects on modern life. The scene behind the title shows men working in a stamping plant making car bodies.
In the plot, Hulot has somehow gotten a job as an industrial designer for a fictional car company named Altra, a company that has assigned an American publicity agent, Maria (Maria Kimberly) to shepherd Hulot's new model to a car show in Amsterdam. In keeping with the nomadic spirit of the era, he sketches out a whimsical little van for le camping. Though Tati's critique of materialism is less sharply-focused here than in "Mon Oncle", perhaps because Europe and American were still in the afterglow of Woodstock Generation hippiedom, he shows how the revolution symbolized by camper vans could be commercialized. Features of his little car include faux wood paneling in American style...
…and a skylight over the sleeping space in the rear. Along the route to the auto show, the crew gets help loading and unloading their van into Altra's transport vehicle. Not surprisingly, they get detoured by misadventures, including a flat tire and running out of fuel.
After transport driver Marcel breezes through Belgian customs without stopping, the little van is impounded by police, who suspect that it has been stolen. Among the features of his design that Hulot demonstrates to cops and to Marcel is this grille that folds down into an actual grill, perfect for barbecuing steaks or burgers whilst involved in le camping.
The police are impressed with all the features tailored to a life of le camping, but don't release the van until the next day, when the proper paperwork arrives.
Maria, who has run ahead to catch a preview of the auto show, returns and picks up Monsieur Hulot and they continue to follow the transport in Maria's yellow runabout (a Siata Spring 850) accompanied by her little pooch. They get involved in a chain-reaction car wreck in a roundabout, Hulot helps out an accident victim, and then they need to get repairs made. While that's happening, someone steals Maria's dog as a gag, and by the time the pooch is returned, they are running seriously late...
By the time they arrive a the Amsterdam show, all the exhibits are being dismantled, and Maria realizes she'd gotten the closing date wrong. It seems that Maria's talent for disorganization matches Hulot's own, and that the two characters are, as the French would say, sympathique...
Hulot investigates one of the last standing exhibits of a DAF 55, a non-fictional car from a Dutch company that today makes trucks. He gets into the show stand car...
Then discovers it's a cutaway display rotating on a spit like a roasted chicken. Meanwhile the Altra company director discovers that his belatedly arriving team has been billed 300,000 francs for their non-existent exhibit, and fires Hulot. It appears that Maria is now out of a job as well...
The two escape into a pouring rainstorm under Hulot's umbrella. Director Tati gives us shots of comic interactions in the passing cars, including a couple whose hand gestures match the rhythm of windshield wipers, and Hulot and Maria draw together as they scoot in front of a rare Lancia Fulvia Zagato. Though Tati has always been skeptical of the effects of cars on society, he's always managed to find choice cars for filming.
By the film's final scenes, Hulot and Maria are escaping the rains together after running the wrong way down a subway exit, and it's clear they're happily on their way somewhere that is not inside the auto industry. Director Tati's concluding scene, though, is of cars jammed into what looks like permanent gridlock, going nowhere, the result of the industry's and the advertiser's dream of offering Everyman his own private locomotive. It's a gently funny movie, in a different spirit than the subversively comic "Mon Oncle", and without the often riotous hilarity of "Playtime", At release time, the New York Magazine critic Judith Crist praised "Trafic" for being a "non-blockbuster", and Tati's little road trip of misadventures still feels that way.
Photo Credits:
All scenes from the film, including the initial publicity shot of the flying Citroen DS, are from Films de Mon Oncle and Les Films Corona.
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