Highway Fatality

By JAY COCKS

Directed by JACQUES TATI

Screenplay by JACQUES TATI and JACQUES LAGRANGE

Jacques Tati has made three previous excursions into the amuck world of M. Hulot, upon whose heron head rain down all manner of comic disasters. Mr. Hulot' s Holiday (1953), the first, still seems the best, the most genuinely poignant and inventively funny. Further installments -- Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), photo graphed in 70 mm. and yet to be released in the U.S. -- have grown progressively more precious. Often the complexity of a Tati gag outweighs the punch line. In Traffic, it overwhelms it. Ingenuity, not wit, is the real point of the exercise, and laughter is strangled by mechanics.

Virtually plotless, the film is a series of skits having to do with the efforts of M. Hulot and his fellow employees of the Altra auto company to get a new-model family camper from the firm's Paris plant to an auto show at Amsterdam. They are waylaid on the highways by a seemingly endless variety of motorized misfortunes, ranging from an elementary flat tire to an epic collision. Oddly, most of the movie is so slow that it seems to have been enacted under water. Watching Hulot (Tati) trying to make his way through mazes of automobiles is a little like watching a wayward eel float through a fleet of submarines.

Diligent Pupil. As a comic actor, Tati has become over the years so closely calculating that he has lost all trace of spontaneity and humanity. His every gesture is self-conscious and self-congratulatory. As a director, he has become a great deal more elaborate but somewhat less inspired. Traffic's set pieces, like a large pile-up of cars in an improbable accident, all seem too cherished and worked over; they have a laboratory air about them.

Tati has obviously -- perhaps too obviously -- learned from the old masters. Keaton's mechanical virtuosity is on view, or at least attempted, as are Chaplin's timing and resilience and Langdon's scrambled innocence. Tati absorbs and assimilates each skill like a diligent pupil taking great care with his lessons, and that is the way they are applied. Watching Tati is like listening to the brightest kid in the class run through his homework, dogged, letter perfect and without inspiration. His movies since M. Hulot's debut have been very like the best scene in that film, where Hulot, out for a little recreation, finds himself slowly and inescapably folding up in a kayak, then sinking majestically beneath the sea. .Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.