Word: hulot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enthusiasm that has greeted these latest adventures of Mr. Hulot appears to be the product of critical wistfulness. Tati is the last in a once great tradition of pantomimic screen comedians. Out of a desire to keep that tradition alive, writers seize on the odd, amusing bits in his films, overpraising them while ignoring Tati-Hulot's glaring inadequacies...
...aimlessness that hangs so heavily around Playtime is thickened by the fact that Hulot cannot be said to be a character in the sense that Chaplin's Tramp or Keaton's Great Stone Face was. He is passive where they were active-even revolutionary-in their relationship to the things and the people who tormented them. Chaplin was insouciantly defiant when pressed, Keaton manically inventive. Both were also incurable romantics. They were people of dimension, people with plans and aspirations and a wide range of feeling. One could identify with them, suffer and exult with them...
...Hulot, on the other hand, is just a pleasantly boring presence, a cipher who shows no feelings beyond a spaniel-like curiosity and momentary flutters of frustration that never approach the level of anxiety, let alone threaten him with breakdown. He and the people he encounters are scarcely less abstract than their settings, juiceless and lifeless. Going to a Tati movie for laughs is about as practical as going to an exhibition of Mondrian paintings with the same goal in mind, though the painter may actually excel the actor in terms of motion and emotion. · Richard Schickel
Virtually plotless, the film is a series of skits having to do with the efforts of M. Hulot and his fellow employees of the Altra auto company to get a new-model family camper from the firm's Paris plant to an auto show at Amsterdam. They are waylaid on the highways by a seemingly endless variety of motorized misfortunes, ranging from an elementary flat tire to an epic collision. Oddly, most of the movie is so slow that it seems to have been enacted under water. Watching Hulot (Tati) trying to make his way through mazes of automobiles...
...absorbs and assimilates each skill like a diligent pupil taking great care with his lessons, and that is the way they are applied. Watching Tati is like listening to the brightest kid in the class run through his homework, dogged, letter perfect and without inspiration. His movies since M. Hulot's debut have been very like the best scene in that film, where Hulot, out for a little recreation, finds himself slowly and inescapably folding up in a kayak, then sinking majestically beneath the sea. ·Jay Cocks