Trafic
| Trafic | |
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Original French release poster
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| Directed by | Jacques Tati |
| Produced by | Robert Dorfmann |
| Written by | Jacques Tati Jacques Lagrange Bert Haanstra |
| Starring | Jacques Tati Tony Knepper Franco Ressel Mario Zanuelli Maria Kimberly |
| Music by | Charles Dumont |
| Cinematography | Eduard van der Enden Marcel Weiss |
| Edited by | Jacques Tati Maurice Laumain Sophie Tatischeff |
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Production
company |
Les Films Corona
Les Films Gibé Selenia Cinematografica |
| Distributed by | Les Films Corona (France) Columbia Pictures (US) |
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Release date
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | Italy France |
| Language | French Dutch English |
Trafic (Traffic) is a 1971 Italian-French comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. Trafic was the last film to feature Tati's famous character of Monsieur Hulot, and followed the vein of earlier Tati films that lampooned modern society.
Tati's use of the word "trafic" instead of the usual French word for car traffic (la circulation) may derive from a desire to use the same franglais he used when he called his previous film Play Time, and the primary meaning of trafic is "exchange of goods", rather than "traffic" per se. The word "Trafic" was subsequently used for a light utility vehicle model manufactured by Renault starting in 1981.
In Trafic, Hulot is a bumbling automobile designer who works for Altra, a Paris auto plant. He, along with a truck driver and a publicity agent, Maria, takes a new camper-car (designed by Hulot) to an auto show in Amsterdam. On the way there, they encounter various obstacles on the road. Some of the obstacles that Hulot and his companions encounter are getting impounded by Dutch customs guards, a car accident (meticulously choreographed by the filmmakers), and an inefficient mechanic. In the film, “Tati leaves no element of the auto scene unexplored, whether it is the after-battle recovery moments of a traffic-circle chain-reaction accident, whether it a study of drivers in repose or garage-attendants in slow-motion, the gas-station give-away (where the busts of historical figures seem to find their appropriate owners) or the police station bureaucracy.”
In 1972, an American reviewer wrote that “Jacques Tati's Traffic is so non-blockbuster, in fact, that it is absolutely therapeutic for today's moviegoer, a velvet-gloved healing hand from the past to remind us of children's laughter and adults' smiles of satisfaction at the comedy that had indeed evoked their laughter at first sight.” Michel Chion has written that “Trafic turns out to be as impure a patchwork as Play Time was pure and intransigent. Nonetheless, it is an endearing film for different reasons: we are invited to a picaresque journey of a man who leaves Paris to go to Amsterdam for a car show, but arrives much too late to participate.”
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Wikipedia