User reviews

This movie will undoubtedly not be what you expect. The cover-art of Tati DVDs paints him as a Chaplinesque figure, but he's much gentler than Charlie. Charlie was energetic. You'll enjoy Tati's films if you expect a gentle trip to a beautiful little village. Throughout the film you observe more than get really involved. Tati always keeps you at a distance, like a stranger.

I liked Mon Oncle the best first run through, but by that stage it was the fourth of Tati's major four pictures I'd seen, so that must have coloured my impression. The most famous is Les Vacances de M. Hulot, and M. Hulot is Tati's famous character, who appears in Mon Oncle, Les Vacances and Playtime. He doesn't appear in Jour de Fete, which was Tati's first first feature-length.

Tati is the Antonioni of slapstick comedy. There's plenty to look at in his movies, as long as you stop waiting for a narrative. None of them have real stories. They do progress, but its more the visual motifs of the various townspeople that develop throughout.

Of the four I'd say Playtime is the least friendly to first-timers.

All copies of Jour de Fete since 1995 feature the imperfect colour process it was filmed with. Its not colourised, that's just the best colour method that Tati had at his disposal in 1949 in France. Even after restoration it suffers from over-brightening and unevenness in colour, and the overall impression is of a bad colourisation, so just be ready for that, and remember this colour version wasn't available until 1995, before that there was no colour, and I think the colour's an important part of the experience of Tati's fete.

I'd recommend you rent/borrow before buying any Tati, so you know what you're getting. Probably youtube won't be the best place: any small segment of his films won't make sense on its own, they're quite slow-paced, and the characters and scenes are meant to accumulate, not be excerpted.

Happy hunting.

When I first saw this film I couldn't get it out of my head, and put it in my all time top ten. The magic has faded a little, but this remains a classic for its strange mixture of gentle slapstick, sight gags and verbal jokes, and its beautifully atmospheric portrait of French rural life.

At a small village fair, the postman François is watching a documentary movie on American postmen: they use helicopters, airplanes and parachutes to deliver mail, for a rapidity question. Rapidity, haste: that's what's in François's mind now. He wants to deliver mail as faster as he can into the small communities he crosses everyday…

This film has surely got an easy-going atmosphere; the gags succeed and are never totally alike. The mosquito each time comes back when you don't expect it. François riding his bike always finds something different to get you laughing! If you are French, then you'll understand villagers' peasant accent, and you won't miss to giggle! Some gags may remember you Charles Chaplin's ones, except that Jacques Tati used speech and colors, but dialogs almost escape notice, and colors aren't shocking.

I recommend this one to Chaplin's fans and other film-lovers.

With Jour de Fete, French genius Jacques Tati began exploring many themes that littered his quite wonderful career. The plot is, like many of his works, very simple and is centred around one very basic idea - here the bumbling postman Francois, played by Tati. The small rural town of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre is visited by a travelling fair, who bring joy and colour to an otherwise quiet area. Francois goes quietly about his business under the nose of the village-folk who hardly seem to notice him, apart from when they're making fun of him or getting him drunk. After seeing a documentary showing the advanced methods of postal delivery in the U.S., Francois makes use of everything around him to make his own service as fast and efficient as in America.

Clocking in at only 70 minutes, this is certainly Tati's least ambitious project, but he was very much honing his craft (this was his directorial début . His reputation as the Antonioni of slapstick is evident, as Tati feels just as comfortable watching the simple and natural interaction of the village's inhabitants in the quite beautiful rural landscape, as he is falling on his arse. Tati barely appears for the first twenty minutes or so, which is relatively laugh-free, but these early scenes are important in understanding the point of the film. By having such a calm and naturalistic opening, Francois' desperate struggle to meet the demands of a society relying increasingly on technology becomes all the more ridiculous. And there lies the satire, something that he explored more head-on and ambitiously in Playtime (1967).

Not to say Jour de Fete is without ambition, as Tati was so dedicated to his craft that he shot the film on two cameras - one with standard black-and-white photography that was the norm in 1949, and one with Thomsoncolour, a quite primitive and experimental colourising process. Thomsoncolour went bust before the film was released, and Tati was forced to release the black-and-white version that circulated for years. Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff and cinematographer Francois Ede managed to release the film in it's original colour in 1995, but the film looks grainy, damaged and diluted. Yet it's nice to think that Tati thought his work and vision was too grand for black-and-white, and he's right. Although this is by far the least laugh-out-loud of Tati's work that I've seen, there is plenty here to hint at the genius to come, namely the quite brilliant final few frames that has an excited child running after the leaving fair, gradually shrinking in the distance.

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A wholly enjoyable film, in which dialogue is incidental to the visual effect. I preferred black and white over colorized, and the French version over the slightly edited US version (with subtitles and the addition of an annoying artist who participates in colorizing). The real joy is watching Tati. Underneath all the great gags stirs the soul of the postman: officious, determined, mulelike. All expressed without words by a mustachioed rail of a man poised delicately on a bicycle. I was glad to see in the credits that La Poste had sponsored the restoration of the film. A French national treasure.

Tati's first feature film (he has made some shorts before) from 1949 is about an inept bicycle riding postman (Tati himself, of course) trying to adopt more efficient ways of delivering mail in a quaint French rural village, after watching a documentary of the American postal system. One must say first that the gags here are not as good or as funny as in Tati's later films (especially Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle). Still, this is worth seeing, especially in its color version (Tati was disappointed with its primitive color system, so he finally decided to release the film on black and white; the color version of the film was restored and released to the public many years later, after Tati's death). What is more striking of the movie when one sees it now is to look, even in a color that leaves much to be desired, at a rural France that no longer exists.

Personally, I think Tati's films are hilarious; but they're not to all tastes. Some have told me that they loathe his work. I've never figured out why, but I think it's because the character that Tati usually plays himself is so totally dead pan, so unaffected by the events around him (which he is usually causing) that many miss the more subtle comic bits happening that effectively generate his environment.

At any rate, Tati's main shtick - or at least his best known - is to take a pretentiously upright petite bourgeoisie with 19th century sensibilities and drop him into 20th century France where he must confront a society that is largely defined by the gradual eroding of those sensibilities. He usually has serious difficulties with little things like record players or radios. He's a hazard in a car, but the world's no safer when he rides a bicycle. But through it all, he never loses his aplomb, which is derived from his inner recognition that the nineteenth century was more interesting than the 20th overall.

In this film, the 20th Century is best (or worst) represented by the recurring presence of Americans. Around the time of the release of this film, the French began to worry that the American, who had liberated them from the Germans, might never go away - a worry that remains influential in French politics to this day, and with some justification. Certainly Tati's postman, on his humble bicycle, appears to be no match at all for the Americans in their motor vehicles - except that his innocent buffoonery somehow manages to get the best of them every time.

That give's the film a slight satirical edge, and one which leaves a real impression. Otherwise, we still have the imperturbable Tati, whom "neither rain nor snow nor sleet" - whatever.

Enjoyable and wholly entertaining.

I could watch this postman delivering letters to the citizens of this little town for hours. Although it's not as colorful as Tati's more popular movies it doesn't mean that it doesnt' have it's charms, it's filled with great slapstick comedy and that always works for me. I always see this being last on Tati's ranked list but so far it's my favourite of his (still have to watch Playtime and Traffic).

This first, non-Hulot comedy feature by France's Tati, who derives from the silent greats and can keep company with them too, centers on his gangly bicycling postman Francois, mingling with the many and varied denizens of a tiny, ancient French village. When the carnival comes to town, a tent cinema shows a movie of the hilariously high-tech, high-speed, muscleman American postmen, the insecure Francois first gets very drunk and then is seized with the urge to do his job very, very fast. Gentle, sharp-eyed, teeming with life, this isn't even regarded as one of his best, but after trying for years this screening finally brought me around to LOVING Tati. For one thing it's a love letter to bicycles, a sure sell for the surprisingly large Bike Week audience that came out to Cinecycle for this screening. For another thing there are more articulated personalities in this movie than there are in any dozen current releases; EVERYONE is acutely drawn, from the woman in the high window to the recurring character of the buzzing bug. It's a goddam tapestry of humanity, and as a result it's positively moving as well as laugh-out-loud funny. It's also very cinematic in spite of its antiquity, most obviously in some out-of-nowhere colorization, but also in compositions that pay off in a much less rigidly controlled way than any comparable American comedy - the good stuff is often happening in the corner of the frame, like a good Mad comic with a halo.

I gotta admit it--I'm not particularly a Jacques Tati fan. Although many consider his films exceptional, I just never felt that excited by them. However, in this film he does not play the more familiar Mr. Hulot character, and as such has a little more dialog and his humor is a little more briskly paced (as much of it is done on bicycle).

This is certainly not a bad film and I liked it more than the Hulot films. In fact, I laughed a few times when I watched it. It's just that I felt it was a very slight film--not especially remarkable but fun to watch. I'm sure than in 6 months or so, I will have forgotten most of it.

«Jour de fête» is a very funny movie about François (played by Jacques Tati himself), the local postman who want to be as fast as the postmen in America. The camera work is excellent so is the cinematography. Very joyful movie too. The music score is great and it's a good way to show «l'ambiance de fête» that lives in the village.

I really enjoyed that movie. The only little drawback, and it's not really one, it's the regional french dialect used in this movie. I'm french-speaking and even I had some difficulty to understand some of Tati's lines.

8 out of 10.

Jacques Tati followed one of the normal paths towards feature film directing: through short films. He wrote, starred in, and eventually directed a handful of shorts, culminating in his directorial debut of "School for Postmen" with Tati playing a smalltown French postman named Francois who rapidly moves through his small town to deliver the mail with his own personal flair. When he got his chance to make his feature film directorial debut, he seems to have simply decided to expand on the ideas from "School for Postmen" to the point where Jour de Fete's finale is a repeat of the short film to the point where Tati reused somewhere around a dozen shots from the short. However, the issue is that, like some other directors who rose up through the short film path, Tati didn't quite know how to build a feature length film, so his feature film debut ends up feeling like a series of shorts stitched together until he reached 87 minutes.

In a sleepy little French town, a carnival arrives one morning, greeted by the mayor, and gets ready to set up for the day's celebration. Marcel (Paul Frankeur) and Roger (Guy Decomble) begin unpacking and roping in the locals to help set up the central pole that should stand up in the center of the town square. This section is essentially narrated by the bent over old woman of the town, and it introduces most of the characters who live in the town square. There's the café owner who has painted all of his chairs. There's the woman who lives over the square and makes eyes with Roger. The issue I have with this is that this section takes about twenty minutes and it doesn't really seem to matter very much. These are side characters in the film to come, and the way this film opens it feels like Tati was setting up an ensemble piece.

This movie is Tati's, though. His character, Francois the mailman, rides in with a certain aloofness and ends up directing the successful upbringing of the pole. It's an amusing little sequence that never becomes what I might call funny, but it's enough to entertain slightly. And that ends up being the level on which most of the rest of the film works. As the festival rolls out, Francois continues on his rounds, and he ends up back at the festival getting drunk by slight deception on the part of Marcel and Roger, the gags are always slight and charming, but never hilarious. It also has a certain generic feel that distances itself from the rest of Tati's later work.

It does gain the certain luddite aspect that Tati would revisit in his later films at about the halfway point when a Francois watches a silly little promotional film about American postmen. According to this short film (which uses completely unrelated stunt footage to solid comedic effect) American postmen were regularly training to fly helicopters, getting picked up by airplanes without exactly boarding them, and driving motorcycles through fire, pumping up the idea of the "modern" way of delivering mail in contrast to Francois, who still rides a bicycle with the same busted wheel that he has to fix himself. This is the setup for Tati to essentially end his first feature length film with his first directed short film.

After another bit where Marcel and Roger have fun at Francois' expense, insisting that outrageous methods of riding a motorcycle are the right way to do things to go faster, Francois begins his day with energy and flair, flipping his shoulder sack around his body, hitching a ride alongside a truck to stamp his mail as he goes, and jumping off the back of his bike while its still moving to save himself seconds. A lot of this is re-filmed footage, though some individual shots from the short do appear here and there (including the best comedic bit in both dealing with the rope attached to a church bell), and it gives the film the kind of comedic energy the rest of the film doesn't really have. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it saves the film, but it does make ending funnier than expected.

It's not a bad first effort from Tati at all. Jour de Fete is a nice, gentle little film. It just doesn't really have a center. The first bulk of the film ends up feeling extraneous. The adventures of Francois feel disjointed. However, it's never less than nice.

First Jacques Tati feature film. The film concerns a festival in a small town and the colorful postman (Tati) who serves it.

Originally shot in both color and black and white, with the black and white to be used if something happened to the untried color film. As fate would have it the film remained only viewable in black and white until recently because no lab would attempt to process the color film stock. Recently the color negative was processed and edited together by Tati's daughter. The result is a film that looks like a slightly faded color postcard from days gone by. I mention this because the film feel like an old snap shot of days gone by.

The film is an okay film. Its funny and charming and very rough around the edges as befits a first feature. Its not a terrible film by an means but its not a great film. The film at times in fits and starts and there often seems to be long build ups to jokes that misfire, while some seeming throw away gags bring big laughs. Its a problem that plagued several of Tati's other films to a lesser extent, but here seems a bit more rampant because there doesn't seem to be the same rigid control Tati had in the Hulot comedies. Speaking of the Hulot films this film appears to have been raided if not for gags but for a certain visual style. I think every later film save Play Time has echoes in this one.

I like this film, but I don't love it. Its not a film that I'm going to be putting on again any time soon. Yes I will watch it again, particularly once the memory of my recent marathon viewing of the Huolt films fades.

If you're a Tati fan I'd give it a try. If you've never seen a Tati film you could try it but be warned better films followed this one.

5 out of 10

When I first saw this film I was amazed by its simplicity but also surprised by its competence. Its a cheerful and really funny piece of a great French actor and director, with some fine and really original scenes in it. This comic masterpiece about a day in a picturesque little French village, in which the postman Francois is being followed, on his daily tour, when a carnival is taking place. The speed of the modern way of life is brilliantly compared by the typical easy calm French way. Francois symbolizes this old way by doing everything slow and wrong on and off his bicycle. The little but creative stunts are really figured out for that time and are inspired by Buster Keaton and have a little touch of Chaplin in them.

The uniqueness of the film is that the story is creating itself. As the day follows we get to know the village and it's inhabitants and we are also learn a small lesson by a little old lady with a goat.

Surely a must see!

Originally intended to be shown fully in colour, there is now a DVD release of the film in which every frame is colorized, however the most widely available print as of 2005 is a black and white one with a few objects coloured in by hand. That is the version that I watched, and which this review is about. The film has similarities to Tati's famous M. Hulot tetralogy, and although inferior, this is still amusing stuff, with the gags delivered through the action of the characters rather than their speech. The film is pretty much without plot, and the main story involving a postman only starts a significant way into it, but it still manages to amuse. The narration by an old woman does not enhance the film though. Certain random objects are coloured in for the black and white print, and while this is interesting too see, it is just a gimmick, and not anything artistic. There is little, if any, thematic motivation behind the choices of what is to be in colour, and therefore it barely enhances the film. Overall it is still an above average film despite its drawbacks, there is some interesting sound work and the selected music is delightful. It is entertaining, but lacking in the depth that 'Mon Oncle' and 'PlayTime' would display.

You see the upcoming problems of traffic in this little village just after the war, I guess somewhere in Normandy where the bicycle of François the postman can drive from village to village. Some cars were driven really dangerously because nobody was conscious of the danger of accidents and some people drove to fast through the villages where everybody still lived on the street: the dogs as well as the chickens as the gooses as the elder people. When François gets drunk he enters the local café and stands in two seconds at the window of the first floor! The movie is full of gags that are inspired by Buster Keaton but absolutely original. The people he has to deliver the letters, peasants and habitants of the village shout at him: "A l'Americaine" which means fast and efficient but one of them also comments that he just should deliver the letters and that this is already quite an accomplishment. And yes, in Belgium postmen are now checked on maximum 9 seconds for delivering a letter. There also calculations to make another tariff for delivering letters in places far away. Jacques Tati is unsurpassed as a French comic and he has a very special place in history of French cinema not to be compared with anyone else.

Once a year the fair comes for one day to the little town Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre. All inhabitants are scoffing at Francois (Jacques Tati), the postman, but he seems not to recognize. The film is largely a feature-length extension of Tati's earlier short "School for Postmen".

The film is largely a visual comedy, though dialogue is still used to tell part of the story. This really calls to mind the silent greats of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. Had Tati been born a couple decades earlier, he might have been included among their ranks.

While not perfect, and with less-than-stellar production value, the promise of Tati is evident here. His future films (including "Mr. Hulot's Holiday") would expand on this comic intellect.

The color version is certainly a revelation and much to be preferred to the murky black-and-white sub-titled print I saw on original theatrical release. Actually sub-titles are not really necessary at all. Even born-and-bred Parisians would have difficulty penetrating the heavy provincial accents of the villagers. Furthermore, much of the dialogue is deliberately mumbled, slurred or made indecipherable by background noise. The only stretch of speech that is clearly heard is the narration of the tent movie and its information could easily be picked up by simply watching the visuals. Even an ability to understand the old lady (she is supposed to be a native but has an incongruous Parisian accent) who acts as a narrator to tie the various segments together is not at all important.

So what we actually have here is pure pantomime that is given added realism by being filtered through an aural surround. Tati is the perfect clown who makes the most of a succession of clever gags that are superbly timed and all the more enjoyable because of their insight into the mores and customs of the little village. In fact as a revelation of village life with all its atmosphere, its interplay, its horseplay, its petty quarrels, its come-and-go tensions, the movie is second to none.

The support characters too have a wonderful part to play in the action, whether professional players like Frankeur, Beauvais and Decomble or simple villagers like Vallée and Wirtz who never made another movie in their lives.

The beautiful music score lends further enchantment to the pastel colors of Tati's immaculately chosen locations.

All told, a little masterpiece and a fitting herald to Tati's best and most celebrated movie, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953).

Jacques Tati's first feature came as a salve to the horrors of war and its resulting despair (check out the trailer as proof) and the film's sweet sensibility seems designed to make the post-war French audience feel good about itself. It details an innocent, peaceful time in the countryside in which a traveling fair comes to a small village, almost as a reward for surviving the heartache of the previous decade; and the happy villagers flock en masse to forget about their stresses for a day. Tati plays the village mail carrier, a self-righteous but likable beanpole who, after watching a film at the makeshift cinema about advances in American mail delivery, attempts to mimic them in all their ridiculousness using only his trusty bicycle. Tati has no problem poking gentle fun at his character's stuffiness but also delights in the absurdity of the feeling of inferiority the French seemed to have assumed; after years of living under the yoke of the Nazis and then the Allies, their competition with America is presented as needless and silly. (It's not for nothing that Tati's character is named Francois.) As a comedian, Tati seems to derive his influence primarily from Buster Keaton's graceful and perfectly timed stunts, but his take is more wobbly--you really feel the danger of what's happening on screen almost as if it were unrehearsed. (Among other stunts, he rides his bike through a fire and cuts in front of an oncoming car.) While there are no real laugh-out-loud moments, there are plenty of warm chuckles and some really pleasurable recurring gags, particularly with a cross-eyed old man. But where the film shines is in its poignant conclusion, where the promise of a carefree future is personified by the child who adopts Tati's responsibilities after he sheds them to fade into the anonymity of the peasantry. As long as you come into "Jour de Fete" with the right attitude and appreciate it for what it represents, you'll have some fun.

The title of this lop-sided production is highly misleading, which is why I've substituted my own. Before watching this colour version I felt sure I'd seen the film in black and white, in about 1949. All I seemed to remember was the postman leaping on his tethered bike, cycling away, and being jerked to a standstill. But somehow it didn't look at all the same when I saw it in colour just now. Are the two versions identical in content ?

Anyway, the film has little to do with the fate worse than death. Unusually for Tati, who has here a nearly normal walk, it has something which is almost a plot, which is that Tati sets out to demonstrate that he is the equal of American postal practices, employing planes, helicopters and the rest. Needless to say, he fails, but his French failure is preferable for those members of humanity with endearing values. End of story. I didn't think it was much good, but it foreshadowed Hulot's sublime holiday. Holidays have no plots; they just are. And so are fêtes. Good shots of happy children.