The Beauty of Comedy: 'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday'
Remembering that the funniest sides of us are maybe the most noble.
In the next week or two, I'm going to be charging into the breach again to deal with what seems like the continually most unavoidable subject for anyone living in this country: American politics. I'm not, as you may have gathered if you've been reading my work for a while, all that hopeful about this topic. As with the environment, it seems clear that ours will be the generation that is forced to reckon with (or perhaps have our lives ineradicably altered by) not the fact that specific people did terrible things, but the fact that when you subject people to very large forces pushing hard in certain directions, they (we) too-frequently make decisions that end up causing great damage. Those decisions accumulate and take on a life of their own, and then, as the man once noted, things fall apart.
It's a tough time all around, and we're all aware of it. But I think there's a danger in obsessing about this – particularly politics – to the degree that we do. It's not only bad for our stress levels; it shapes us, I think, into creatures for whom everything is political.
And we do not function particularly well when we see the world only through the lens of politics. This obsession, indulged in to excess, turns us into mean and calculating creatures, and it's also self-defeating, because it makes us stupid about other people, which in turn makes us, I think, bad at politics itself. Read the more shrill political commentators these days and you will see how long they are on jargon and how short on wisdom, how trussed up by their own visions of why they must be right, how full of pedantry and how lacking in actual knowledge about human beings.
The answer to this disease, of course, lies in the continual return to the good 'ol human bona fides: love, laughter, exploration, curiosity, beauty – things like that. The political may occupy your mind, yes, but neglect the beautiful and you're putting your soul at risk.
And comedy is one of the highest explorations of beauty.
This may not seem immediately obvious, because we're not accustomed to thinking of comedy, particularly in terms of movies, as being associated with beauty. When people talk about beautiful movies, they're often thinking of ones with glorious cinematography, which is not something that appears in most comedies; in fact, one gets the sense that a lot of comedic filmmakers might feel that beautiful on-screen compositions might detract from their films, competing with the content somehow, and so they go out of their way to keep the visuals as prosaic as possible.
But not Jacques Tati. He proved that comedy can be visually beautiful. And beyond this, he proved that at its best, comedy trades in a kind of beauty that is deeper than simply putting pretty things on the screen: the beauty of our lives themselves.
So to understand how he did this, and just to appreciate how damn beautiful his comedy is, I thought I'd look at a sequence from one of his most beloved movies.
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, from 1953, is Tati's first film in which he played Mr. Hulot, which he would go on to do several times subsequently. It tells a very simple story. There are a number of vacationers at a beach resort, Mr. Hulot shows up to join them, and funny things happen over the course of the summer. At the end, the summer is over, and everyone leaves.
It's an essentially plotless movie, in other words, and once you understand its rhythms and tempos, it becomes magical.
There are any number of sequences I could point to as containing this magic, but the one that I've been thinking about the most lately involves a small boat – like a canoe – and a number of different gags. Ordinarily, I'd post the clip of it first, and then talk about it, but here I'm going to post some stills first, and try to explain why I find them so beautiful, and then I'll put the video (which runs about 5:30) at the end.
The sequence begins with Mr. Hulot leaving the hotel to head down to the beach. He's immediately hailed by an English woman who's also vacationing there, and we get this shot:
Notice the careful framing here: the railing at her shins and the walkway to the right create a kind of V to draw our eye to her, and she's shot from below so that her enthusiastic wave is framed by the sky. We are also looking up at her (as is Mr. Hulot), which works to emphasize her status, as if she's somehow slightly larger than life. Everything in the composition works to highlight her, that is; but what is it, exactly, that is being highlighted? For me, it is something akin to the vibrancy of her personality. Her self. Her excitement, the energy, and at the same time excessiveness, almost silliness, of her gesture. There is no disdain here, and no mockery; yes, there's something funny about the moment, but it arises out of the character – who is framed to make her beautiful, in a way – rather than at the expense of the character.
Again and again throughout the sequence, and the film, Tati plays this delightful trick of using his compositions to highlight human absurdity. But he always does so in a way that draws us closer to them, so that we laugh in recognition, rather than making them the butt of the joke.
Consider the way he films a group of exercise enthusiasts working out on the beach:
The precision and dynamism of this composition – purely in visual terms – is remarkable. You will notice, if you look at it closely, that it's almost entirely composed of a series of angles and zig-zags. There is the line created by the upper bodies of the people: if you start at either side of the picture and let your eye follow their heads and shoulders across the image, you'll see how this line moves up and down. You'll also notice how the high points of this zigging, above the heads of the two men in baseball hats, are emphasized by the striped tents, and how precisely placed the head and shoulders of the small woman in back are. And then, finally, notice how this series of horizontal angles is replicated almost exactly by the bent arms and legs of the people. The whole thing forms mesmerizing, a geometrically repetitive pattern.
And what purpose is all this formal beauty put to? Not, as it is in something like Days of Heaven, another film which I think it's almost impossible to be more beautiful than, to the purpose of stirring the more serious elements of our nature: tragedy, love found and lost, that sensation of coming in contact with the larger things of the universe that a friend of Freud's called the "oceanic feeling."
No, here it serves the purpose, at least on the surface, of making us smile. It is, like so much in the film, gently comic. These people are earnestly engaging in a ritual geared towards improving the health of their bodies, and in doing so they find themselves in this position: it's an exercise that is both difficult to do and asks them to contort themselves into a shape that is visually, well, silly. But this silliness is, here, beautiful. It stirs in us a feeling of harmony, everything arranged just so. And in doing so, it requests (ever so politely, as with so much of Tati's work) that we see these small human foibles – the way we greet each other, the shapes we contort ourselves into – as not outliers in our behavior but perhaps the most natural, harmonious, beautiful parts of that behavior.
In making the human comedy beautiful, that is, Tati helps us to understand that our lovable ridiculousness lies at the center of some of our highest experiences. Like more somber films, he uses the visual to create the sense that what we are watching is important and mysterious; but, because his topic is the humorous and the absurd, it's these things that that are elevated in his work, until they come to feel like the most important things about us.
Here's one more, from a glorious bit that calls directly back to the days of silent film. In it, Mr. Hulot is painting the chair that goes in his canoe. A wave comes in, pulling his paint can out into the water, so that it's not there when he reaches it, and then depositing the can again on the beach after he has begun looking for it. It's a wonderous gag because of the way the can (and later the chair itself) moves, but notice how much care is taken in making the scene visually resonant, with the line of the rocks and the line of the beach forming a pleasing angle, Hulot himself set a third of the way across the image, the fishing pier to the upper left, and a small boat or canoe passing in the deep background. Once again, the playful is made gorgeous, ridiculousness made into the finest thing about life.
All of this leads to a second element of beauty in the film, which is not so much visual as humane. Tati understands people so well, and is able to so clearly capture their foibles on film, that behavior which in another context might not be endearing becomes so here.
A wonderful demonstration of this comes in the sequence when Mr. Hulot thinks a man is spying on a girl in her changing room, and so delivers him a good kick in the rump. It turns out that this is not what the man has been doing at all; unfortunately, Mr. Hulot cannot immediately escape the scene, because he gets dragged into listening to a woman talk about the view, and out of politeness must hear her out. But while he's doing so, he's also casting anxious glances at the spot where the kicked man might appear. And when the man does appear, Mr. Hulot simply breaks down and frantically runs away.
The comedy here is straightforward: a mistake leads to a sticky situation. But the character observation is so precise – from the way that the duty of politeness keeps Mr. Hulot listening, to his anxiety while he's doing so, to his panic at the end – that it becomes more than a gag. In the highest comedic tradition, anxiety and distress are rendered into things we can love about ourselves, the absurdity of the small things we all do is laid bare, and it this all made to seem like the most lovable thing about our lives.
This is maybe the most clear in the way Tati extends the bit. After Mr. Hulot runs away, the kicked man looks over and sees another man cleaning off his foot so he can put on his shoe. Is this the mysterious person who delivered the kick? The kicked man advances, the man putting on his shoe retreats all the way into his tiny changing room, and the kicked man peers into it through a little hole in the door. The humor here is hard to put into words, but has something to do with the way they move, the absurdity of looking into a tiny room through a hole in the door, and also with the fact that what is now happening – a man looking into a dressing room – is the thing that Mr. Hulot mistakenly thought was happening at the beginning of the sequence.
It is a wonderful, striking moment, full of brilliant comedic pacing and tension, elegant in its observations and its structure, and I think if you watch it, you'll see how beautiful it is, in all kinds of ways that are easier to feel than they are to articulate.
I could go on. There's the rhythm and construction of the moment where he's trying to paint the chair, the earnest radical trying to explain politics to the girl who's not much interested in them, the amazing way the man jogs down towards the waterline before the shark bit, the glory of the shark bit, and of course the snippet of the little boy walking into the dining room at the end, which I could not help but include;– all of them operate on both of the levels I've been talking about at the same time.
They are aesthetically pleasing, giving one the visual sensation of being in a relaxed, harmonious space. And yet at the same time they push into the ridiculous, as expressed by precise observation of the most common of human interactions and reactions. In this combination, they work to remind us that being alive is a funny, joyous thing, and that this is perhaps the most important element of our existence.
So give it a watch, if you feel like allowing your soul some sustenance, and remember how beautiful comedy can be when it's done right.
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