Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless, gentle and very funny, 20 Feb 2005
Tati's first feature has been overshadowed by the marvellous films that followed it, (particularly "M. Hulot's holiday") but this little masterpiece deserves to be seen. The pace is slow and the action mostly lugubrious but it is worth giving yourself time for the little details to work their magic. The droll story links a series of priceless set pieces that had me crying with laughter. How can a drunken postman making his way home on a bicycle be so funny? This is visual humour that is both refined and brilliantly funny and there is something wonderfully uplifting and humane in the tone of the film. As so often with Tati, the children seem much more socially adroit than the adults but all the characters are vivid and convincing. Tati beautifully captures a rural French postwar past that was fast disappearing even as he made the film. Hilarious, but much more than just funny.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of his best..., 14 Feb 2005
Compared to the brilliant Les Vacances de M. Hulot this film is somewhat uneven; the film occasionally slows down to almost a complete stop. The story is told in a few lines: fuelled by a spectacular movie about mail-distribution in America he's seen on a travelling fair, the postman (Tati) decides to modernize his way of delivering his cards and letters.
The gags are classic slapstick (think Chaplin and Keaton). The colour-version only heightens the rural, easy-going atmosphere.
If you want to go on holiday to the French provence for just about 90 minutes; this is the way!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Postman Jacques, 26 Mar 2009
Jacques Tati plays Francois, the village postman, stung into an effort to bring the postal service into the 2oth century and speed up his delivery methods. A village fair proves the stimulus - it's nothing more exotic than a roundabout and a couple of stalls, but in one tent there's a film about the modern American postal service ... and comparison with Francois' bike, banter, and bucolic blundering are inevitable. We get every visual gag you could imagine involving a bicycle and a postman. Francois makes Cliff from 'Cheers' look sober and taciturn. The postman is a respected man - his advice is regularly sought on practical problems ... like hoisting a flagpole - but nobody places much stock in the chances of the mail arriving on time, if at all.
Filmed in 1948, Tati used a colour process which proved impossible to transfer to print at the time, so the original release was in black and white (Tati used two cameras, shooting in b&w as a back-up in case the colour failed). The colour version was finally transferred to print in 1995, and it's the colour version I watched. Colour is quite subdued, quite bleached compared to modern processes, but it adds to the atmosphere, conjuring up a bygone era and imparting a contemporary but vintage dynamic to the film.
Shot so soon after the end of the Second World War, the film makes no allusions to this, other than a quick dig at the American army ... and that briefly as part of the main thread of the film which satirises the Americanisation of attitudes and its absorption into French culture. The satire is of the French themselves, not America.
Tati is a comedy genius, on a par with Keaton and Chaplin - he deserves to be far better known in the English-speaking world. Comparisons with the silent era are inevitable: 'Jour de Fete' does employ dialogue, but most of the comedy is visual - sound effects are employed to enhance the visual. Tati was a very funny man, and his films abound in gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, digs at pretension and human vanities. An extremely funny and delightful film which has aged well, losing none of its humour, charm, or wit.
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