The debut feature of comic auteur Jacques Tati, Jour de Fete freewheelingly captures a traveling carnival’s effects on a small French village—and on its bumbling, bicycling postman (Tati) in particular. Though nowhere near the scale and sophistication of a later Tati effort like Playtime, Jour de Fete still offers a masterclass in slapstick and sly visual wit (Tati wields his bike and mailbag with the dexterity of a juggler). There’s also a nice hint of the clever sound design that would come to define his later films, especially during a meet cute between a carnival worker and a village woman near the cinema tent (as they flirt, their gestures match the flowery dialogue we can hear coming from the movie inside). And in Francois, the postman, you can see the seeds of Tati’s eventual preoccupation with what is lost when “progress” is prioritized over people. After watching a newsreel about the technological speed of American postmen, Francois—previously prone to gabbing with the villagers and sharing a drink on his route—tries to turn himself into a model of efficiency. Hooking his bike to the back of a truck so that he can complete paperwork on the open bed while it carries him careening down the road, Francois is both a forerunner of the overwhelmed factory workers in Mon Oncle and a descendent of Charlie Chaplin’s gear-encased Little Tramp in Modern Times. From the very beginning, Tati saw modernity as a monster.
