M. Hulots Vacation essays

M. Hulot's Vacation essays Mr. Hulot=s Vacation (Tati, 1953) is a French comedy with a light touch. The film seems to exist in a time-warp of sorts, depicting a period when French and British tourists mingled on the beach at small resorts with little pretension to be big resorts. The technique of the film is observational from first to last, as if someone had left a camera out on the beach and waited for the roaming M. Hulot to come among and behave oddly in the face of all the different problems associated with a short From the opening frames of the waves quietly coming into shore, the film has an easy-going attitude which suggests a vacation, and while much goes wrong in the course of the film, it is generally of a much quieter sort of chaos than would be seen in the average American film about a vacation going wrong. The film is essentially a silent film, with much owed to the works of Chaplin in America and Max Linder in France, but it is not really a silent film and makes clever use of sound to convey meaning, create and sustain a mood, and point out contrasting attitudes from moment to moment. For instance, the quiet opening marked only by the soothing music and the even more soothing sound of the waves washing ashore is held for a moment as a boat on the beach just sits and waits. There is then a quick cut to the train station where the noisy vacationers are arriving, carrying suitcases, yelling to one another, seeming like children herded from place to place with no clear sense of where they are going. The soothing sounds of the beach shift to the jarring and ongoing din of the train station, two aspects of a vacation, the getting there and the enjoying being there. Tati=s inventive use of sound is apparent in this opening as well, for the calls of the train conductor are mere electronic grunts, too difficult to hear to be called a language. Tati is showing here that there is no need for l...