Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
| Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot | |
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Film poster
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| Les Vacances de M. Hulot | |
| Directed by | Jacques Tati |
| Produced by | Fred Orain |
| Written by | Jacques Tati Henri Marquet |
| Starring | Jacques Tati Nathalie Pascaud Micheline Rolla |
| Music by | Alain Romans |
| Distributed by | Discifilm |
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Release date
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25 February 1953 (France) |
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Running time
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86 \ 114 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (French: Les Vacances de M. Hulot; released as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday in the US) is a 1953 French comedy film starring and directed by Jacques Tati. It introduced the pipe-smoking, well-meaning but clumsy character of Monsieur Hulot, who appears in Tati's subsequent films, including Mon Oncle (1959), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971). The film gained an international reputation for its creator when released in 1953. The film was very successful as it had a total of 5,071,920 admissions in France.
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot follows the generally harmless misadventures of a lovable, gauche Frenchman, Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati himself), as he joins the "newly emerging holiday-taking classes" for a summer vacation at a modest seaside resort. The film affectionately lampoons several hidebound elements of French political and economic classes, from chubby capitalists and self-important Marxist intellectuals to petty proprietors and drab dilettantes, most of whom find it nearly impossible to free themselves, even temporarily, from their rigid social roles in order to relax and enjoy life.
The film also gently mocks the confidence of postwar western society in the optimistic belief in capitalist production, and the value of complex technology over simple pleasures, themes that would resurface in his later films.
For the most part, in Les Vacances, spoken dialogue is limited to the role of background sounds. Combined with frequent long shots of scenes with multiple characters, Tati believed that the results would tightly focus audience attention on the comical nature of humanity when interacting as a group, as well as his own meticulously choreographed visual gags. However, the film is by no means a 'silent' comedy, as it uses natural and man-made sounds not only for comic effect but also for character development.
The film was made in both French and English language versions. While Tati had experimented with color film in Jour de fête, Les Vacances is black and white. The jazz score, mostly variations on the theme "Quel temps fait-il à Paris", was written by Alain Romans.
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