Criterion's Trafic.

Trafic flummoxes some people; no less a comedy authority as Richard Lester has pronounced it 'unbearable,'" writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Playtime's wry and rueful view of modernity and 'progress' is here replaced by a mode of acceptance.... Trafic's lack of effective dramatic momentum is, it turns out, its whole reason for being: the movie insists that life really happens in the interstices of 'events'; that getting there is not only more than half the fun, but all of the meaning. One expects a satire, but what one gets instead is a Zen lesson, topped off by the sight of Hulot actually opening that umbrella he kept furled throughout his five-feature run, as the rain that never happened in the previous films begins to pour down."

Updated through 7/17.

Trafic's "meticulously framed images are stuffed with the recognizably choreographed chaos, entropic mayhem and long-lens potshots at humanity fumbling with mechanization that are its ringmaster's signature," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "If Playtime's enormous scope was visionary, here Tati's tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher."

Earlier: Gary Giddins in the New York Sun.

Updates, 7/17: Reviewing Trafic for Fanzine, Jonathan Rosenbaum, who interviewed Tati for Film Comment in 1972 and then worked for him for a while the following year, first defends Parade, Tati's final film, shot on video and perhaps "his most radical... Trafic, on the other hand, represented a conscious step backward for Tati." He then explains why "Trafic is the only Tati film with any traces of anger.... Harking back to the bucolic pleasures that were prominent in Tati's first two features, Trafic posits aimless and haphazard drift as a meaningful alternative to capitalist compulsiveness."

"The pacing is admittedly awkward, and the characters hard to grasp, but rarely have elaborate gags blended so seamlessly with slice-of-life revelations," writes David Hartman for Artforum. "Tati shot documentary footage for his traffic and auto-show scenes; like Buñuel, he delivers most of his punchlines straight-faced, and many of his jokes are buried deep in his long shots. Needless to say, Trafic rewards repeat viewings."

Posted by dwhudson at July 15, 2008 9:44 AM