Day for Night Magazine

The World of Trafic and the Cultural Commentary of Jacques Tati

By Tony Mills

Most of us do not live history. While we know that we do, it nonetheless feels quite removed from our everyday experiences. But this removal is perhaps a consequence of the mediated means by which we come to know history – textbooks, films, even videogames – rather than the temporal distance that separates us from the actual events. For many, the image of France during the early 1970s – a society in the throes of the changes engendered by the student riots of May 1968 and the modernizing legislation of Georges Pompidou – is likely one whose historic distance is felt as palpably as those images from Truffaut’s classic Jules et Jim or the countless photographs of Françoise Hardy and the Yé-yé movement, yellowed with age. It is certainly not one that draws immediate comparisons with contemporary American society, in which such images of cultural revolution and political activism have become almost indistinguishable from the advertisements and pop pastiches which implement them for quite different purposes. Yet, in watching Jacque’s 1971 satire, Trafic, the social and political parallels between these two historic moments present themselves with a clarity made only more pronounced by the film’s recent Criterion re-release. In short, there is much to be gained in watching this lesser-known work of a classic filmmaker well beyond its comic value.

The narrative, as in most Tati films, is simple. It charts the adventures of the loveable Monsieur Hulot, Tati’s modern-day fool around whom more than one of his films revolves and who is often considered the alter-ego of the director himself. In this film, Hulot is the designer of a new camping car to be demonstrated at an auto show in Amsterdam. It is during this road trip from France to Holland that M. Hulot, Maria (an American public relations officer played by Maria Kimberly) and the truck driver Marcel (Marcel Franval), stumble into the tumultuous world of “trafic” in which cars, trucks, and the noises they create, as well as the characters themselves and the languages they speak, circulate into a world of comic confusion and nonsense. Words appear in this film as little more than “verbal junk,” hardly distinguishable in their constant and humorous failure from the machinery and commodities over which they purport to have symbolic mastery. Indeed, it is well worth mentioning (as Jonathan Romney aptly points out in his informative summary found in the DVD insert) that the French word trafic is rarely used as a synonym for the English “traffic”. It denotes, primarily, the traffic of commerce and exchange. The title of the film thus emphasizes that it is the entire world of confused circulation (of commodities, languages, etc.) in which the characters are enmeshed – and not simply automotive congestion – that is the object of satirical critique.

It is assuredly the journey and not the destination – which proves just as muddled by malfunction – that takes primacy in this slapstick comedy. Even the “characters,” whose intentions are as fraught with inevitable failure as the machinery they manipulate, prove to be little more than singular perspectives from which to view this world. This could be contrasted to the fully constituted characters of a more traditional film, whose agency might function as the catalyst to dramatic action or who appear as the symbols through which greater narrative meaning passes. This is not to say that Tati’s characters do not evolve over the course of the film. On the contrary, it is perhaps Maria whose transformation is the most pronounced – growing from a self-entitled and vain caricature of an American into a light-hearted “free-spirit” – alongside her male companions who all seem to find creative wonder and even happiness within this determinate and reified world. The scene at the end of the film is perhaps the symbol of their emancipation: having made it to the auto show only after its completion, M. Hulot barely seems to care or even recognize that he has been fired, and Marcel stands amid a crowd of eager spectators for what becomes an impromptu showing of the camping car, taking place literally and figuratively outside the confines of the automotive industry.

But this ending is by no means a naïvely positive one. In a characteristically Tati style recalling the last image of his 1967 classic Playtime, the final shot of Trafic reveals, by way of a slow zoom-out, an expanse of automotive traffic stretching into the horizon, in which the pedestrians who fill the blank spaces between the cars are visually reduced to anonyms within a disparate but homogenous group, their umbrellas in hand – an image that might be taken as the “post-modern day” counterpart to the famous Gustave Caillebotte painting that portrays fashionable pedestrians walking the rainy streets of 19th century Paris. It is into this image that M. Hulot and Maria are unknowingly inserted as they walk off – literally “into the distance” – to take their place among these undifferentiated and almost interchangeable pedestrians as they awkwardly navigate through the traffic. It is such an image that comes to symbolize this strange new social landscape, whose horizons likewise seem to expand into the infinite. In this sense, the “emancipation” enjoyed by the characters, and towards whose attainment the film seems to push however faintly, is reinscribed into a broader context of circulation, congestion and trafic. It is perhaps from this perspective that the film can be fruitfully placed in relation to the society from which we now consume it as one more cultural artifact.

For we can imagine without difficulty what our contemporary culture might look like through the eyes of Jacques Tati, with its polyphony of language and image and their almost senseless proliferation throughout new dimensions of social space (the radio waves of cellular phones, cyberspace, etc) in which the circulation and repetition – or trafic – of information seem to have outpaced the value of any content such information might offer. In this sense, the ambivalence with which Trafic ends seems justified, for what has come to pass between the time of its release and our own is perhaps nothing other than the expansion of this new form of sociality that Tati took as an object of critique. This satirical film and the world it portrays thus appear allegorical of our historic moment, and it is such critiques – both poignant and playful – that are at once refreshing and all too lacking within it.

The Criterion DVD package comes with an assortment of special features, including an interview with the cast of Trafic and a bonus disc with a documentary about the loveable Hulot, making this re-release all the more worthwhile. One could only imagine that Mr. Tati would deem it fitting that this film has been inserted back into the traffic of modern day commerce.