Mr. Hulot's Holiday

It is interesting how even a film without words can say so much. Jacques Tati gave up on what people say because what they do is equally important. And it is through that that he is able to express a considerable amount of humor. It is not completely breathtaking, but it is funny essentially all the time, sometimes in a silly way, but that also belongs to it. It is like an element that moderately rushes through a resort town. (12/01/2014)

If Mr.Bean and Frank Drebin could, by some sick coincidence, produce their own offspring, he or she would probably behave just like Mr. Hulot. I'm only talking about the heartfelt spontaneity and unintentional pathos of the title character, whom we come to love even though, unlike the two aforementioned figures, he’s far from being the main and only source of entertainment in the story; there’s also the overall openness and disjointedness of the narrative development, where characters and subplots pile on top of each other, scenes are repeated from different perspectives, characters are characterised by doing nothing and reacting to Hulot's eccentricity, and the main catalyst for individual situations or stylistic choices is not their subordination to the narrative, but the subordination to a system that might be described as one of controlled chance – everything looks like a series of random sketches where Hulot accidentally disrupts the stereotype of resort life, but the course of the disruption is in fact minutely and systematically orchestrated, gradually unravelling the pattern of routine inherent in the idle accomplices of a seven-day holiday. Tati is not only brilliant in his grotesque sketches, the number of which is perhaps a waste for a single film, but also perfectly depicts the conflict of human nature, culminating in an smart, often openly ironic humorous whirlwind. I would really love to have a beer with Tatin, Hulot is my kind of dude. 100% (04/01/2017)