Tatigrams

I'll just use this post to pull together some general thoughts on Jacques Tati.  I'm pretty close to the end of going through the main Tati features with my son.  I think in a week or so we'll get to Trafic.  I'm planning on watching Parade by myself before then,* so as not to end on a thoroughly depressing note.  I guess it was a good thing that Tati was paid to get some of his music hall routines on film, though actually a fair number had already been preserved and show up the various documentaries in the Tati box set.  (There's more than a little duplication in these documentaries, but some have interesting unseen footage.)

I'm also done with all the various shorts, including a very odd documentary on a football match in Corsica, where true to form you barely see the players but Tati focuses on the audience.  And then the two early, early shorts On demande une brute and Gai dimanche.  While Gai dimanche is technically slightly more accomplished than On demande une brute, I really didn't care for it, as it tries to get the audience to root for two con men who flat out steal from everyone they come across.  Plus the pacing is dreadful.  The odds of me watching any of these shorts again (or even Cours du Soir (Night Classes)) is quite low.  I'm more willing to consider returning to Soigne ton gauche or L’école des facteurs.

What is generally never discussed in these documentaries is Tati's illegitimate daughter.  If this impassioned screed to Robert Ebert is largely true, then Tati was essentially chased out of Paris because his fellow music hall performers felt he was a cad by breaking off with his partner and abandoning his daughter (apparently at the insistence of his older sister!).  What's a little harder to understand is that Pierre Etaix was going to play the magician role in a filmed version of The Illusionist, which ostensibly has this father figure rescuing an orphan, but the two quarreled over the morality of the script (again according to this letter, which seems to be the only source of this story).  Did Etaix simply feel that Tati needed to publicly acknowledge his daughter, rather than hide behind a fictionalize filmed version**?  Not sure, though it is certainly a shame that they couldn't have patched things up, since I'm quite sure Tati's version would have been more compelling than the animated version set in Edinburgh rather than Prague.

Perhaps even more of a shame is that Tati completed a script called Confusion in which M. Hulot would have died in an accident early in the film and the rest would have been about two Americans (played by the Mael brothers of the music group The Sparks!) coming over to France to shake up a rural television station.  Maybe it wouldn't have been quite as incredible as it sounds.  The script does exist though it doesn't appear to have been published or translated into English.  Maybe before I pass on, it will enter the public realm.  Who knows, maybe someone would tackle it with CGI, bringing Tati back to the big screen.  One can dream.  I'm not at all clear on why the extended first cut of Playtime (20-30 minutes longer) hasn't surfaced, but that is perhaps a bit more likely to turn up in my lifetime.†   Fingers crossed.

* I finally got through Parade.  The first half isn't so bad, though the bit with the mule just seems a bit cruel and would have been better left out.  I found everything after the intermission to be pretty dire though.  Maybe 20-30 minutes of solid entertainment in a 90 minute television special, but certainly not a particularly good way to end one's career unfortunately.  It just makes me wish even more he could have gotten Confusion off the ground.

** For that matter, Etaix might have felt that the role was too much of a retread of Yoyo, though it is hard to imagine him falling out with Tati if that was really the case.

† Speaking of things in the vault, Etaix and Jerry Lewis worked together on a black comedy about the Holocaust, The Day the Clown Died, which Lewis deposited at the Library of Congress, and this supposedly will be allowed to be shown to the public starting in 2024.  Maybe the fuss isn't warranted (and I would much rather have the missing Playtime footage or the Confusion script), but I'm sure I would at least watch it once.