Trafic, dir. Jacques Tati. France/Italy, 1971. 35mm, colour, 96 min.
This film is another chapter in Jacques Tati’s comedic portrait of modern life as strange, perplexing, and alienating. Yet it is different from Play Time (1967), Mr. Hulot’s previous adventure. It is not just the focus that is different — from the modernist architecture in Play Time to the traffic and automobiles in Trafic — but also the perspective. In this movie there is no dichotomy between the natural and the produced; the kind of contrast that was apparent in the previous work. Here artificial human productions seem almost human — as when a car is, visually and aurally, likened to an animal pursuing a prey (that is, in fact, a tire). Objects have a life of their own, a life marked by functional activity and reflexive reactions — as the car that rests after it has reached its destination. Characters are not entirely defined. That is not a preoccupation. That is why it is so difficult to grasp the development of characters and the formation of the couple in the end may seem so surprising. In essence, characters are not psychologically characterised. The focus of the film is on their actions. A purely formalist approach to the film would ignore how contemplation is encouraged instead of the simple recognition of formal patterns. The world is constantly rearranged as Tati creates and calls attention to rhymes and parallels that gives the impression of being almost casual — the yellow stripes of the road and Altra’s yellow truck, for example. [22.02.2011, orig. 12.2009]
