Product Details

• Actors: Honoré Bostel, Marcel Fraval, Maria Kimberly, Tony Knepper, François Maisongrosse
• Format: Color, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Dutch, English, French
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Columbia Pictures
• VHS Release Date: June 13, 2000
• Run Time: 89 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303153267
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,700 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Trafic, one of Jacques Tati’s later films starring his enigmatic alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, contains more direct social satire than his previous classics Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967), but lacks none of the vibrant physical humor that makes Hulot one of cinema’s most revered comedic characters. Filmed in a vivid color palette of red, yellow, and green cars against a silver and glass Modernist architectural backdrop, Trafic stars Mr. Hulot as the designer of an auto meant to travel in a truck to the Amsterdam Car Show to represent his company, Altra. Hulot’s camper wagon, aimed at simplicity with its efficient built-in kitchen and sleep gear, is constantly delayed due to car accidents, police run-ins, traffic jams, and other ironic mishaps. As Altra’s director (Honore Bastel) waits in their booth decorated with fake trees and bird recordings, Hulot, truckdriver Marcel (Marcel Fravel), and stylish public relations secretary Maria (Maria Kimberly), embark on an adventure in which their vehicles are clearly in charge. Dressed in his trademark tan raincoat and hat, Monsieur Hulot constantly transforms tragedy into comedy. In one famous scene, after hippies place an animal pelt under Maria’s car tire to pass as her dog, Pito, Hulot wears the pelt and dances to cheer his friend. Extended scenes showing trafficky highways and drivers fidgeting in their cars pitted against Hulot, constantly baffled by the technology he is supposed to master, reveal underlying themes of human disconnect with nature. Trafic stands as biting commentary against a culture sabotaged by the invention of the auto, and like Godard’s Weekend, stands as testament to a revolutionary age.

This Criterion Collection release includes important extras, like a 1973 episode of French show, "Morceaux de bravoure," in which Tati speaks about his overall working methods. Also impressive is his daughter’s full-length documentary, "In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot" (1989), which collects ample archival footage of Tati and his friend, professor A. Sauvy, discussing each film’s invention. Here, Tati said of Trafic that he was inspired to make a film that would make people smile after noticing so many frowns on the Paris highways. Road rage assuaged by cinema is a truly Modern gesture. --Trinie Dalton

Product Description
Jacques Tati's final feature captures the wonderful absurdities of human behavior on the street and behind the wheel. Tati's comic creation Mr. Hulot returns to the screen as an absentminded inventor transporting his ultramodern camper to Amsterdam for an auto show. The route along the frenzied superhighway is paved with an amazing string of pantomime feats and sound gags, including one of the most balletic car crashes ever recorded. Tati's gift for visual comedy puts him in the company of masters Keaton and Chaplin, but Hulot--his bumbling, pipe-smoking alter ego--remains a beloved original.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Tati, December 21, 1999

By	PX (London) - See all my reviews

Traffic was the movie which first got me into Tati's work. The story centres around getting a prototype car from France to a motor show in Rotterdam and as you may imagine things do not go smoothly. While Traffic lacks the endearment of Mon Oncle or M Hulot's Holiday it retains Tati's eye for understated visual humour. One of the great things about these works is that you can have seen them 20 or 30 times and still pick up on jokes that you missed before. The humour is not overt and can at times be subtle almost to the point of obscurity, however it repays repeated viewing with a some beautifully wry observations on the absurdities of everyday existence. Not a movie for belly laughs but real feel good humour.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tati's cinema swansong - slow, flawed, marvellous., November 30, 2001

By	darragh o'donoghue (dublin, ireland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

For Jacques Tati, the car is the perfect emblem of the dehumanising effects of modern industrial life. Supposedly a symbol of freedom - of movement, of consumer choice - it actually signifies confinement and uniformity. Our dependence on it dehumanises us; therefore, its capacity for unreliability, for breakdown, seems catastrophic, life-threatening. The proliferaton of cars in our society simply leads to a perpetual traffic jam, an inability to move - a terrifying, apocalyptic early shot reveals an endless parking lot, a virtual city of immobile machines; it also cuts us off from other people.

The problem with attempts to regiment life, to make it uniform and efficient, is that the raw material is intractable human nature, liable to put a spanner in the works through ineptitude, vanity, laziness, incomprehension, desire, officiousness, accident. Tati's simple story follows the Altra car company's attempt to transport a showpiece camping van (full of hilarious parody-Bond gadgetry, including built-in shower and barbecue) to an International Exhibition in Amsterdam. Prodded by an exasperated American public relations officer, M. Hulot and indolent driver Marcel are confounded all the way, by flat tyres, lack of gas, problems with customs, car crashes. As in Tati's very first feature, 'Jour de Fete', a progress leaving humanity behind is signalled by American aerodynamics, in this case the Apollo 11 moon-landings glimpsed on TV.

Tati conveys the industrial homogeneity that scares and angers him in many ways: by emphasising vast, cavernous industrial buildings, numbing in their inhumanity, dwarfing the people occupying them, especially in Tati's rigorous, no close-up shooting; by an austere, monotonous grey colour scheme (buildings, cars, roads, clothes etc.) - even the odd splashes of colour, red, yellow or navy, belong to organisations' uniforms and logos; by the choreography of human activity, whether it is the montage of basic instincts, such as nose-picking or yawning, or ballets of mindless movement, such as the shapes thrown by survivors of an auto-accident; or more didactic montages emphasising the sameness of machines, their reflections multiplying other machines, obliterating the humans operating them. Tati posits against this uniformity: comedy, failure, dream-like sequences - a recurringly eerie effect is the proximity to noisy, country-destroying motorways of quiet rural lanes and towns, where the industrial exists in a more delapidated and decaying, but more eccentric and human form.

'Trafic' won't go down in history as the funniest film Tati made, especially compared with its predecessor, 'Playtime', one of cinema's true masterpieces, whose comic crescendo of collapse it seeks but never attains. The more obvious gags often fall flat or resort to coarseness; the satire is frequently heavy-handed. Even the music, so integral to Tati's art, sometimes sounds like it escaped from a Robin Askwith sex comedy.

Nevertheless, 'Trafic' is pure delight from start to finish, largely because of Tati's long-shot, set-piece style, which allows for an unhurried accumulation of comic detail, a revelation of character through action rather than psychology, and some of the most extraordinary visual visual designs in film - in other words, it offers the viewer a freedom to breathe not vouchsafed the characters. There is a particularly, nastily funny sequence involving a hippy practical joke and Hulot being cruel to a fur jacket.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can be enjoyed over and over again -the mark of a classic, December 1, 2001

By A Customer

I first saw "Traffic" years ago in a theater and enjoyed it greatly. Then, it vanished and was unavailable for a long time. When it emerged on VHS I bought it eagerly. My first viewing of the tape was something of a let-down. However, the second time I looked at it I began to understand it again and subsequently have continued to find it a delight -just as I did originally. His gentle observations of the Dutch are quite perceptive. This is not "Mon Oncle," of course, but to one who was around when the movie was made (about 1970) it does remind me of an atmosphere of openness and tolerance which lamentably is now gone.