Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday

Jacques Tati introduced his most famous creation in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), the seaside comedy that established him as France's foremost comic auteur and earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay. Tati directed, co-wrote and starred, and he built the film out of patient, affectionate observation of how people behave, with very few jokes in the usual sense.

The plot is barely a plot. Hulot, all elbows and good intentions and a sputtering little car, takes a holiday at a small Atlantic resort, and Tati simply watches the comedy of manners unfold around him. Dialogue is almost incidental. The film is made instead from a carefully worked soundtrack of creaking doors, distant radios and the famous twang of the dining-room door, and from wide compositions in which several gags play out at once in the corners of the frame. It is comedy as choreography, closer to silent cinema than to the talkies of its day.

The film made Hulot an icon, a figure of pre-war courtesy adrift in the modern leisure age, and Tati developed the character through Mon oncle and the monumental PlayTime. Gentle, melancholy and endlessly rewatchable, it has lost none of its charm, and its influence runs through the work of comedians and film-makers from Pierre Étaix to Wes Anderson. It finds a great deal of human nature in the small rituals of a fortnight by the sea, and it gets better each time you see it.