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, building the film not around jokes so much as around patient, affectionate observation of human behaviour.

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 constructed instead from a meticulous 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 would develop the character across 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. A summer idyll that finds the whole of human nature in the small rituals of a fortnight by the sea, it only deepens with each viewing.