An enduring icon of the French cinema, actor Jacques Tati trademarked the character of Monsieur Hulot, the droll ordinary Frenchman, blithely pursuing his modest pleasures, seemingly oblivious to the pitfalls of modern society that surround him. Director Tati crafted a style of understated visual comedy that has influenced a generation in his wake.

Born on October 9, 1907, in the community of LePecq (about eleven miles west of Paris), he was named Jacques Tatischeff. As his name suggests, he was of Russian lineage, his paternal grandfather being the Russian ambassador to France. An art framer by profession, Tati's father, Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff, married a Dutch woman named Marcelle Claire Van Hoof.

As a young man, Tati was a sports enthusiast, playing tennis, rugby, and boxing, educated at the Lycee de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Rather than follow his father's career path, Tati became a professional rugby player for the Racing Club de Paris in 1925.

An apocryphal tale suggests that it was in a locker room that Tati was inspired to pursue a show business career. He so impressed his teammates with pantomimic recreations of his sporting achievements that they encouraged him to take his talents to the public. It was on the music hall stage that Tati, like most great screen comedians (including Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and yes, Jerry Lewis), refined his craft, mimicking prominent athletes of the day. Having found his professional calling, Tati left the Racing Club team in 1930.

Always fascinated by technology, Tati experimented with filming some of his comic performances. Among his earliest efforts was the short film Oscar, champion de tennis (Oscar: Tennis Champion, 1932, directed by Jack Forrester), patterned after one of his sports-themed stage routines.

During the 1930s, Tati collaborated with several filmmakers, including René Clément, who would later direct the acclaimed drama Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits, 1952). Together they filmed a boxing comedy, Soigne ton gauche (Watch Your Left, 1936).

Tati put his career on hold during World War II, enlisting in the French Army in 1939. During the Nazi Occupation of Paris, Tati found refuge from German persecution in a small town outside Paris. Tati would later return to the town and use it as the location for his first feature film. Near the end of the war (on May 25, 1944), Tati married Micheline Winter, who remained his wife until the filmmaker's death in 1982.

After the war, Tati redoubled his efforts for a career in cinema. He began appearing in supporting roles in commercial features, such as Claude Autant-Lara's Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps, 1947).

Having gained the necessary technical and aesthetic experience, Tati seated himself for the first time alone in the director's chair (he had co-directed 1935's Gai dimanche [Happy Sunday] with Jacques Berr). The film was L'ƒcole des facteurs (School for Postmen, 1947), and it set his feature filmmaking career in motion. The tale of a small-town letter-carrier who attempts to streamline his delivery methods, it embodied the low-key comedic flavor as well as the overarching theme -- of an everyman adapting to the modernized world -- that would characterize Tati's later work.

The popularity of L'ƒcole des facteurs enabled Tati to fund an expanded, feature-length version of the story. Renamed Jour de fete (1949), it revived many of the comic situations of the short film (inspired by the silent comedians of yesteryear), and allowed Tati a broader canvas to flesh out the town of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre as a microcosm of the contemporary world. Constructing an allegorical world would become a major preoccupation of Tati's. The small towns, quaint neighborhoods and sterile cities would become essential ingredients in his films.

At this point, Tati continued to build his career as methodically as a brick mason, each new film building upon the success of the previous, each one expanding the range of his audience and the degree of critical favor.

The critical and popular response to Jour de fete encouraged the making of another feature, which propelled Tati to international prominence: Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 1953). This was the first screen appearance of M. Hulot, the on-screen persona with whom Tati was most closely identified throughout his career. With his long-stemmed pipe, raincoat and hat, Hulot is a lovable embodiment of the French working class, happy in his own modest world, not tempted by the modern luxuries and class consciousness that consume the bourgeoisie.

Rather than accelerate the pace of his films through editing and emphasize his gags with closeups, Tati was content to frame the action in uninterrupted wide shots, allowing the comedy to play out in a stage-like setting. Instead of being walloped with jokes, the viewer is called upon to carefully observe each moment, and find the bits of comedy hidden within. The leisurely pace of Tati's films helps the viewers appreciate the simple pleasures that the director felt were going unnoticed in mid-20th century life. Tati once remarked that "nobody whistles on the streets anymore." It might be said that Tati's films are an elaborate effort to revive the spirit of such a simple pleasure.

In an essay on Tati's career, Jaime N. Christley recounts an apocryphal story of Tati's ancestors, how Tati's Russian grandmother had "infiltrated Moscow to rescue Tati's father, then only a small boy, from the Tatischeffs who'd abducted him and previously brought about the death of Tati's grandfather." Christley observes, "That sort of international intrigue, sweeping romance, tragedy, and sheer convoluted storytelling, is by and large missing from the years Jacques Tati spent on the planet, and from his art: as magnificent and beautiful as his films are, they maintain a modest, gentlemanly tone. There is almost no drama at all in Tati's films -- even when Hulot's brother-in-law in Mon Oncle [1958], Monsieur Arpel (Jean-Pierre Zola), raises his voice in anger, the film's vital signs don't fluctuate for a moment."

The four years that passed between the releases of Jour de fete and Mr. Hulot's Holiday signify the precision and care with which Tati crafted his films. Though simple on the surface, each setting and situation was meticulously engineered by Tati. Because he did not want to be hindered by the oppressive schedules of studio production, Tati maintained his creative independence at all costs. He shot his films in small towns and privately-constructed sets instead of studio backlots, forbidding entry to reporters and publicity agents. He avoided working with established actors to further evade the public eye. When an American television company offered Tati a contract to produce a series of Hulot shorts, he declined.

The minimal dialogue in Mr. Hulot's Holiday allowed it to play to American audiences typically resistant to foreign films, and provided Tati with the resources to expand his cinematic vision. The film earned Tati an Oscar® nomination for Best Screenplay, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, but it won neither.

M. Hulot returned to the screen in Mon Oncle. As if coming back to claim the prizes that had been denied him in the previous film, Mon Oncle was awarded a Special Jury Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (among numerous other honors). Again, Tati's ambitions had expanded, as did the size of his audience, as did the amount of time between films (now five years).

His next film proved to be, by far, his most ambitious to date -- so ambitious that the scale of Tati's vision seemed to overwhelm the simplicity of his stories. Shot in 70mm with stereophonic sound, Play Time (1967) took nine years to complete, and required the construction of enormous chrome and glass sets to depict an ultra-modern, impersonal urban landscape. In order to raise the production funds, Tati sold off the rights of his previous films. The first cut of the film ran 155 minutes but, after a disappointing debut, Play Time underwent immediate and extensive cutting. When it finally reached the U.S., it had been shortened by more than an hour. It was released in 35mm, with conventional monaural sound.

Play Time disrupted the economic foundation Tati had methodically laid. Since he had surrendered the rights to his previous films, invested his own funds, and obtained loans from others, he had little clout with which to pursue another feature.

But Tati's vision endured. With some difficulty, Tati raised the funds to shoot Trafic (Traffic, 1971). It allowed him to prove that his sensibility and sense of humor were as sharp as ever, and were not dependent upon large-scale production. Abandoning the custom-designed mega-sets, the five-year production spans, and epic running time, Tati created a film that is remarkable in its utter simplicity. It follows the character of M. Hulot (in his final screen appearance) as he drives from Paris to Amsterdam to attend an international auto show.

Upon its original American release, Roger Ebert wrote, "Tati's endless invention creates a series of incidents along the road. The incidents are so involved they're almost impossible to describe, but Hulot copes with them with good nature and never loses his philosophical equilibrium."

Trafic helped restore Tati's reputation, but it did not expand his filmmaking opportunities. His final film, Parade (1974) was produced for Swedish television. Contrary to Tati's expectations, it was not given a theatrical release, but has since been resurrected and given its due as the legendary director's true final feature.

At the time of his death, Tati was working on another project, with the help of American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. This would-be film, entitled Confusion, promised to explore his darker sensibilities about modern life. Set within the world of telecommunication and advertising, it has M. Hulot being accidentally killed (on live television) in the first act.

Before filming could begin, Tati himself died -- on November 5, 1982, in Paris, of a pulmonary embolism.

Fortunately, Tati's legacy is carefully protected by his children: assistant director Pierre Tati and editor Sophie Tatischeff. Efforts to preserve the filmmaker's body of work include the 1995 restoration of the color version of Jour de fete and the 2002 restoration of Play Time. As the full breadth of Tati's vision continues to be brought to light, his impact on film history seem more significant, his insights into modern society more profound, and his flair for capturing life's simple pleasure even more poetic.

by Bret Wood