Parky at the Pictures (DVD 4/10/2012)

Opening with aerial shots of the resort before lingering on the palm trees and the waves rolling into the idyllic beaches, Vigo and Kaufman amuse themselves by turning one sunbather into a skeleton and comparing other holidaymakers with strutting animals. They even use a series of lap dissolves to strip a woman naked. The British Board of Film Censors took exception to this sequence and removed it from the print. But the real message here was contained in the images of the workers going about their daily chores, with Vigo cross-cutting between factory workers and statues to suggest both the nobility of labour and the dehumanising nature of mechanisation.

The emphasis fell on more graceful movement in Taris (1931), a short cine-poem that was less a profile of champion swimmer Jean Taris than an avant-garde exploration of the rhythms and ripples he created as his body glided through the water. Moodily lit and making innovative use of close-ups, slow motion and freeze frames, this Impressionist gem is also notable as an early example of underwater cinematography and Vigo would reproduce similar subterranean ethereality in his final feature, L'Atalante (1934).

Before this, however, Vigo delighted the Surrealists and shocked the conformists with Zéro de conduite (1933), which was viewed with such suspicion by the authorities that it was instantly banned and was only reissued in 1948, when it exerted a considerable influence on François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson, who respectively drew on its anarchic example for Les 400 coups (1959) and If.... (1968). Yet, while this became a template for the school rebellion picture, it owed much of its laissez-faire spirit to the fact that much of the production was a complete shambles.

The project was backed by Jacques-Louis Nounez, an entrepreneur who sensed there was a gap in the market for medium-length films. Thus, Vigo was presented with a budget that only allowed him to cast four experienced actors and forced him to dispense with such niceties as precise continuity during a shoot that comprised eight days in the studio and another week on location. Mostly reliant on single takes, he compiled a rough cut that exceeded the running time Nounez required by 1000 feet and no one has seen the excised footage since.

Yet, the haphazard nature of the action suited Vigo perfectly, as his aim was to blur the lines between reality and fantasy both in evoking his own detested schooldays and in celebrating the anti-establishment attitudes of the father who had died when he was just 12 years old. The opening sequence makes these intentions plain, as Louis Lefebvre and Coco Golstein meet in a train compartment en route to their boarding school at the end of the summer holidays and proceed to use feathers and balloons to transform themselves into a chicken and a woman before puffing away on cheap cigars and discovering that the slumbering man in the corner of the carriage has been dead all along.

The fun soon stops once the boys are reunited with Delphin, the pompous dwarf principal, whose loathsome staff includes the sycophantic snoop Pierre Blanchar, the hectoring Robert Le Flon and the grotesque chemistry master Léon Larive, whose obese bulk is cruelly contrasted with the skeleton with which he collides while waddling around his classroom. Only Jean Dasté has any empathy with his charges, as he makes them smile in the playground by repeating a gag from Charlie Chaplin's Easy Street (1917) and lightens lessons by balancing objects on his desk and bringing a cartoon to animated life when a colleague enters to express his disapproval with his methods.

Given the rigidity of the regime, there's no wonder that the pupils seize every opportunity to let off steam. But it's interesting to notice that Gérard de Bédarieux is left in inglorious isolation in the playground, while Gilbert Pruchon looks on in dismay as his classmates taunt his dinner lady mother (Madame Emile) with cries of `Mrs Beans'. Yet such allusions to the cruelty of children only serve to reinforce the authenticity of a snapshot of school life that has often been overlooked by critics dwelling on its more fanciful set-pieces: the dormitory pillow fight and the commemoration day uprising.

Sublimely photographed by Boris Kaufman, the blizzard of feathers makes atmospheric use of slow-motion to prolong a moment of innocent exuberance that is made all the more disconcertingly magical by Maurice Jaubert's score, which was re-scored and recorded in reverse and then re-recorded backwards to restore the original composition, but enhance it with a dreamlike quality that contrasts with the mock regimentation of the boys as they parade up and down the room. And this mood of rebelliousness continues into the special assembly in the hall, in which the four ringleaders exploit the presence of dignitaries (who are hilariously supplemented by dummies dressed to the nines) to hurl objects at them before causing a fire and scampering across the rooftops to ascend into the sky.

It is easy to see why this was such a treasured film for the members of the nouvelle vague and why it has since remained something of a punk favourite. Defying the tyranny of narrative logic, it almost seems to rely on chance for scenes to hold together and for the inexperienced juvenile cast to do the right thing at the right time (or not). This edginess keeps nostalgia at bay and ensures that no hint of sentimentality can creep into the depiction of the repressed pupils. And this distinctive blend of poetry and realism would recur in L'Atalante, which gloriously reminds viewers jaded by 3-D and CGI of film's unique ability to tell stories in simple images from life that delight the eye, challenge the mind and stir the soul.

Accompanied by the residents of a country village, newlyweds Jean Dasté and Dita Parlo stroll to the riverbank to board his barge, L'Atalante, and resume his passage from Le Havre to Paris. She has never left home before and he only knows the canals between the coast and the capital. But second-in-command Michel Simon is a man of the world and he shows Parlo keepsakes from his travels (including a dead buddy's jar-preserved hands) in a cabin overrun with impish kittens.

Despite being enchanted by Simon's tales, Parlo sufficiently keeps her wits about her to deflect his clumsy attempt at seduction by coaxing him into modelling the dress she is making. However, she is unable to prevent Dasté from becoming increasingly jealous of her friendship with Simon and cabin boy Jean Lefebvre and he further sulks after she delights in the conjuring tricks performed by peddler Gilles Margaritis in a waterside bistro.
Thus, when Parlo defies his orders and slips away to see the City of Light, Dasté casts off without her and she is left to fend for herself on the street after being robbed. But Dasté quickly realises his error and rediscovers his feelings for Parlo after seeing her face on plunging his head beneath the water in what she insists is the only test of true love. They are reunited, but, such is the tantalising mix of fantasy and reality that Vigo employs that it is by no means certain that they will live happily ever after.

Luminously photographed in monochrome by Boris Kaufman and accompanied by Maurice Jaubert's even more impossibly romantic score, Vigo's sole feature is a fascinating blend of conventionality and nonconformism. The marital melodrama turns around the chauvinism of the crew members and Parlo's inability to find a niche in a floating milieu that contrasts starkly with the stable environment she has left behind. But, as in countless screen love stories before and since, the attracted opposite kiss and make up in the final reel and, even though some might object to the domestic tyranny to which Parlo submits, few would wish them anything but happiness.

Nevertheless, as befits the son of an anarchist, Vigo cannot resist either revisiting the Surrealist subversion of Zéro de conduite or espousing its anti-bourgeois sentiments in his depiction of the relationship between the staid Dasté and the genially boorish Simon. Thus, rather than simply being a touching tale of two hearts, this is a political tract on the continuing merits of those revolutionary tenets liberty, equality and fraternity. However, it is also a celebration of sexuality, with the climactic shot of the phallic barge gliding along the sunlit canal being as risqué as anything by the period's chief provocateur Luis Buñuel in Un Chien andalou (1929) or L'Age d'or (1930).

Perhaps the finest exponent of the Poetic Realist style that Vigo did so much to fashion was Marcel Carné, who charted in features like Le Quai des Brumes (1938) the decline of French self-esteem as the optimism of the Popular Front era gave way to gathering gloom as the prospect of war with Hitler's Germany became increasingly inevitable.

This adaptation of a Pierre Mac Orlan novel that marked the first of Carné's seven outings with the poet-cum-scenarist Jacques Prévert. Initially, the project was due to shoot under producer Raoul Ploquin at UFA in Berlin, but Goebbels deemed the story of an army deserter to be too decadent for German audiences. So, Carné returned to Paris, where the project received official sanction on the proviso that the word `deserter' was never mentioned and that Jean Gabin's anti-hero treated his discarded uniform with suitable respect.

Arriving back from Tonkin, Gabin wanders along a darkened road in Le Havre seeking sanctuary. He happens upon a rundown bar owned by Edouard Delmont, who notices everything, but rarely asks questions. Here he meets Michèle Morgan, who is herself a runaway from forbidding guardian Michel Simon and they immediately fall in love. Simon runs a gift shop, but is also in cahoots with the knavish Pierre Brasseur, who also lusts after Morgan and takes exception to Gabin defending her honour.

The newcomer is not without friends, however, as genial drunk Raymond Aimos reassures Gabin after the nocturnal shooting of one of Brasseur's henchmen and painter Robert Le Vigan takes pity on him to such an extent that he encourages him to assume his identity and wear his clothes after he commits suicide by drowning. However, while Gabin is able to secure a passage on a freighter bound for Venezuela, he can't forget Morgan and puts his life at risk to rescue her from the clutches of the vengeful Simon.

Updating the action from 1909 and transferring it from Montmartre to the coast, Prévert merged two of Mac Orlan's characters to produce Gabin's fugitive and changed his paramour from a prostitute who murders her pimp to a teenage waif at the mercy of her lustful godfather. But, more significantly, he invested the material with a philosophical gravitas and a sense of foreboding that was reinforced by both the coastal locations and Alexandre Trauner's atmospheric studio sets.

Indeed, the tone became so bleak that the suits at Ciné-Alliance tried to persuade Carné to fashion his story into a lighter, romantic tearjerker, while backer Gregor Rabinovitch urged Gabin to reconsider his participation in such a downbeat saga, in case it damaged his career. Clearly he had never seen Julien Duvivier's La Bandèra (which was also based on a Mac Orlan text) or Pépé le Moko or Jean Renoir's Les Bas-fonds, as Gabin's tragic heroes were already becoming the screen barometer for France's dwindling sense of self-esteem.

But no one before had quite managed to imbue Poetic Realism with such an all-pervading air of fatalism. During the Occupation, Carné was accused of having preconditioned France to defeat by sapping their spirit with this hopeless vision. Yet this is now cited as a key influence on film noir and is considered by many to be the French equivalent of Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942).

Capturing the mood of the people in two very different periods, Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) made a virtue of its stylised recreation of the Boulevard du Temple in the 1830s, as this celebration of the French spirit was always made with the collapse of Vichy and the liberation from the Nazis in mind, so that it could stand as a symbol of the nation's indomitability. Reissued in a shimmering new print, this is one of the masterworks of world cinema and simply has to be seen.

As the scene opens on `Boulevard du Crime', the first part of this glorious 190-minute epic, France is still enjoying the benefits of the Bourbon restoration and the crowds are milling along the Parisian thoroughfare renowned for its very different places of entertainment - the Grand Theatre, where the great works of literature are performed, and the Théâtre des Funambules, which is known for the garish melodramas that delight the common people up in the gods (or, as they say across the Channel, `le paradis').

Actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) dreams of becoming the darling of the masses, but he sets his sights slightly lower in flirting with Claire Reine (Arletty), a free-spirited beauty known as Garance who appears in a carnival sideshow. She is also desired by Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), a thief who masquerades as a scrivener to cover his larcenous and often subversive activities. However, he is quite prepared for Garance to be accused of the theft of a gold watch and it's only the intervention of mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault) that prevents her arrest, as he had witnessed the crime and acts it out for the benefit of the police and Garance rewards him with a flower.

Baptiste's father Anselme (Étienne Decroux) also performs at the Funambules, alongside Nathalie (María Casares), the manager's daughter who has always been devoted to the melancholic mime. However, her displays have recently been lacklustre and her father bribes peddler Jéricho (Pierre Renoir) to read her palm and convince her she will marry her ideal man. Thus, she is more enamoured than ever when Baptiste and Frédérick improvise a piece of comic business to cool tempers after a fight breaks out that night between rival players.

But Baptiste's hopes of romancing Garance seem dashed when he sees her accompany Lecenaire to the seedy café, Le Rouge Gorge. Yet, even though he is ejected by the thuggish Avril (Fabien Loris) for attempting to dance with Garance, she takes pity on him and agrees to move into a room in the tenement where he lives with Frédérick. Unfortunately, however, her singing catches the actor's ear and he seduces her and invites her to join the troupe, leaving Baptiste to pour his heart into the anguished performances that make him a star and make Nathalie love him all the more. However, Garance also wins new admirers, including Comte Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou), an arrogant dandy whose offer of protection comes in handy when she is implicated in one of Lacenaire's bungled robberies.

With Garance now in hiding, Frédérick dedicates himself to his art and, as the second act, `L'Homme Blanc', opens, he has become the leading man at the Grand Theatre. However, his decision to turn a mediocre melodrama into a raucous, crowd-pleasing comedy backfires, as the authors challenge him to a duel. But, following a nocturnal contretemps, he finds himself accompanied by an unlikely second, as, instead of robbing and killing him, Lacenaire (who has ambitions to become a playwright) recognises Frédérick and asks to become his friend.

Meanwhile, Baptiste has married Nathalie and found fame of his own at the Funambles. Indeed, he is such a major star that Frédérick comes to watch him to relax after surviving his skirmishes and is surprised to find Garance sharing his box. She has been travelling the world with De Montray and yet has never forgotten the simple mime who loved her with such sincerity. Frédérick is stung by the depth of her feeling and realises he now understands the jealousy that will enable him to play Othello with genuine insight. But Garance is persuaded against making her presence known to Baptiste when Nathalie spots her and sends her young son to the box to sing the virtues of his happy family life.

On returning to De Montray's mansion, however, Garance finds Lacenaire waiting for her and he confronts the Comte with a knife on being informed that Garance has no feelings for him. The revelation arouses De Montray's suspicions and Garance admits she can never love him as her heart belongs to another. However, she promises to be faithful to him and he can proclaim their union from the rooftops if he so desires.

But everything unravels at the opening night of Othello. As the Comte believes Frédérick is Garance's paramour, he tries to goad him into accepting a duel and has Lacenaire tossed out of the Grand Theatre when he comes to the actor's defence. Elsewhere, Garance bumps into Baptiste on the balcony and they slip away to her former lodging. The following morning, Lacenaire murders De Montray at the Turkish bath for humiliating him at the theatre and Nathalie finds her husband with Garance. Unaware that her protector has been killed, she flees into the bustling boulevard as the carnival procession comes past and the star-crossed lovers are parted forever.

It's somewhat surprising that nobody has ever made a film about the making of Les Enfants du Paradis, as its production is every bit as compelling as the picture itself. Jean-Louis Barrault suggested making a film about Baptiste Deburau and Frédérick Lemaître when he met Marcel Carné in Nice in the early 1940s. However, Carné's longtime screenwriter, poet Jacques Prévert, was reluctant to centre a story around a mime. On discovering the misdemeanours of Pierre-François Lacenaire - who was nicknamed `the Dandy of Crime' - he became more enthusiastic and shooting was scheduled to start on sets designed by the peerless Alexandre Trauner in 1944.

According to rumour, the majority of the 1800 extras required for the crowd scenes were members of the Maquis, who needed daytime cover and food to enable them to fight the Occupation by night. Moreover, Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma were Jews and worked incognito under the noses of the Nazi soldiers who supervised proceedings. They could not prevent the sets being destroyed in a storm, however, and three months passed before shooting resumed in Paris. But Carné was in no hurry to complete the feature, as he wanted it to be the first movie shown in the capital after the liberation and he was aided in his delaying tactics by the appointment of cinematographer Roger Hubert to another assignment and his perfectionist replacement Philippe Agostini's insistence on matching the exact lighting in every single pick-up shot.

A futher setback was caused by the Normandy landings in June 1944 and the need to replace Robert Le Vigan as Jéricho after he was arrested for collaboration with the Germans. But Carné finally wrapped and premiered the film in the Palais de Chaillot on 9 March 1945. It was an instant success and critics have been eulogising about it ever since. The scope and scale are deeply impressive considering the conditions under which it was made, while the performances are as impeccable as the production values. But it is the undimmed sense of joie de vivre and national pride that makes this so relishable and it remains a beacon of defiance against tyranny 66 years on. Arletty missed the premiere, as she was in prison in Drancy on a charge of consorting with a German officer. In fact, she had started her affair with a Luftwaffe colonel after Carné had dispatched her to entice the Nazis into letting them use the chateau that Napoleon had once given to his laundress lover as the Comte's residence. Ultimately, the charges were dropped and, although Arletty's reputation never fully recovered, Garance remained the embodiment of Free France.

Moving on some seven decades, Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1952) is set in the Belleville district of the capital and derives from the true-life romance between fabled prostitute Amélie Hélie (who was nicknamed `golden helmet' because of her blonde hairdo) and Joseph `Manda' Pleigneur, a ruthless thief whose rivalry with Dominique Leca earned their gangs the nicknamed `Apaches' in the popular press because they were supposedly as savage as the Native American tribe of the same name.

Such was the notoriety of the story in the early 1900s that a theatre hired Amélie to play herself in the musical Casque d'or et les Apaches, only for the police to close it down after the premiere led to renewed violence between the Manda and Leca mobs. However, she finally achieved immortality courtesy of Simone Signoret's luminous, BAFTA-winning display in this enthralling melodrama whose fin-de-siècle atmosphere is so deftly caught by Jean d'Eaubonne's Impressionist-inspired production design, Antoine Mayo's exquisite costumes and Robert Le Fèbvre's shimmering monochrome photography.

In the five years since he was released from prison, Serge Reggiani has kept his nose clean and made a steady living as a carpenter. However, when he bumps into old cellmate Raymond Bussières at a rustic riverside guinguette, he makes the acquaintance of crook William Sabatier and an entourage that includes right-hand man Claude Dauphin and his coquettish moll, Simone Signoret. Enraptured from the moment they dance together, the pair run into each other back in the litter-strewn backstreets of the city and Sabatier becomes so jealous that he challenges Reggiani to a fight.

Desperate to possess Signoret himself, Dauphin tosses a knife on to the cobbles as the rivals square up to one another and then encourages Bussières to pocket the belongings that were dropped in the scuffle that culminated in Reggiani stabbing Sabatier to death. Forced to flee to the country, Reggiani meets up with Signoret once more and they spend two blissful days together. However, news reaches them that Dauphin has framed Bussières for the murder and Reggiani falls into his trap when he returns to Paris to do the honourable thing and give himself up.

From the opening scene that so irresistibly recalls the joie de vivre of Une Partie de campagne (1936), Becker seems to delight in taking every opportunity here to pay homage to his mentor Jean Renoir, whom he had served as an assistant for eight years. Yet, while the fluency of the camerawork and the elegance of Marguerite Renoir's editing evoke the master as readily as the bucolic setting recalls the paintings of his father Auguste, the spirit of Marcel Carné is also evident in the noirish manner in which Reggiani sacrifices himself for a brother and, as a result, loses the woman he loves. Nevertheless, Becker imposes his own authorial imprint on the picture and, even though it was a critical and commercial disappointment on its original release in France, it's noteworthy that François Truffaut (then reviewing for Cahiers du Cinéma) was sufficiently impressed by it to lift ideas for his own period pieces, Jules et Jim (1961) and Two English Girls (1971).

Bristling with a machismo respectively flecked with decency and devilry, Reggiani and Dauphin make splendid adversaries. But Becker only has eyes for Signoret's ravishing beauty and the fragility of her redemptive passion for Reggiani. The way in which it is snatched away from her is genuinely tragic, as is the courage she shows standing while beside the guillotine. Indeed, it's hard to think of another femme fatale who suffers so prettily, so painfully and so poignantly for simply losing her heart. Yet, for all its psychological intensity and cinematic grace, this never quite conveys the warmth generated by such hot-blooded emotions and, thus, this authentic Becker may only be an imitation Renoir after all.

Lastly this week comes the excellent news that two of Jacques Tati's masterly comedies are being released on Blu-ray for the first time by the BFI. Available in dual format editions, both Jour de Fête (1949) and Mon Oncle (1958) come with alternative cuts, with the former being a 1964 variation that reworks the 1949 monochrome original by inserting a new character (the English-speaking painter) and elements of hand-painted colour and the latter being a English-language remake that was shot simultaneously with the French version. Moreover, Jour de Fête is bundled with a trio of shorts: Soigne ton gauche (1936) L'École des facteurs (1947); and Nicolas Ribowski's Cours du soir (1967).

Jacques Tati is not only France's greatest comic, but he is also one of its finest and most fearless film-makers. He was born Jacques Tatischeff in Le Pecq in 1908. He trained as an artist and played rugby to a decent standard before becoming a music-hall turn, whose celebrated sporting impersonations bore the influence of Max Linder, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Having learned screencraft while making shorts like Soigne ton gauche (which he co-directed with René Clément), Tati acted in two features for Claude Autant-Lara before directing himself ( in the L'École des facteurs , which was essentially a dress rehearsal for Jour de Fête .

Tati had spent the latter part of the Second World War voluntarily exiled in Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre and he had returned to shoot L'École des Facteurs. So where better to set the story of François, a postman who is so impressed by the film he sees during the sleepy village's Bastille Day celebrations about the US postal system that he sets out to bring the same speed and efficiency his own humble bicycle service.

Tati planned to produce France's first colour picture by shooting in Thomson-Color. However, he was warned that this experimental process was unstable and, so, he wisely opted to make a monochrome record as back-up. The story of the lab's failure to process the Thomson stock is now part of film lore. But Tati's editor daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, and cinematographer François Ede used cutting-edge technology to develop the negative and, between 1987-94, they painstakingly pieced together Sophie's interpretation of her father's original intention. Her major amendment was the removal of a young painter Tati had added when he re-edited and re-mixed Jour de Fête in 1964. Indeed, he had never been wholly pleased with the film and had immediately revised it following a less than auspicious Parisian premiere.

However, there's an irony that modern techniques should have been used to create this approximation of Tati's design, as the clash between tradition and progress is one of the comedy's key themes. Indeed, Tati's mock homage to American efficiency could now be viewed as an advanced warning of the perils of globalisation, as he clearly felt caught between gratitude to the nation that had liberated France and resentment at the cultural cost that was being exacted by the economic aid bestowed under the Marshall Plan.

Establishing Tati's twin penchants for the comic counterbalance of sound and image and for allowing gags to unfold in their own the time and space, this remains a wonderfully fresh and funny film. Tati's own performance as the ungainly, but dauntlessly buoyant postie is a masterclass in silent pantomime. But the juxtaposition of this slapstick poetry with the precisely detailed pastoral idyll gives this unceasing delight an aching nostalgia to match its frantic energy.

Having won the prize for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, Tati drew an Oscar nomination for the script for his second feature, the peerless Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), which demonstrated beyond all doubt that Tati was the heir of the silent clowns, as he saw comedy primarily as a visual medium. However, his films were infinitely more democratic, as anyone or anything within the frame could potentially be amusing. Thus, while his genial alter ego was the notional hero of this glorious seaside farce, it was very much an ensemble piece, as visitors to the tiny resort of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer try to relax in spite of the courteous, affable and hugely accident-prone M. Hulot, who is so committed to making the most of his vacation that he barely notices the comic chaos that follows in his wake.

As in every Tati picture, each gag was timed to perfection. Moreover, in the absence of dialogue, sound took on a key comic role, with the audio and the visual elements frequently conniving at duping the audience into expecting pay-offs that never arrive in the anticipated form. In addition, Tati also kept his camera at a distance to allow viewers to discover the gags in their own time. Indeed, it was an almost Hitchcockian approach to humour, as Tati built up the comic suspense. But Hulot's greatest achievement was its liberating contravention of the rules of screen storytelling that had existed since the heyday of DW Griffith.

This quiet revolution had an incalculable impact on the nouvelle vague and Tati further distanced himself from the mainstream formula with Mon Oncle (1958), an acutely observed parody of the dehumanising impact of gadgetry on modern life in which he not only made inspired use of props and exaggerated sounds, but further disavowed the notion of a star vehicle by so refining his `democratic comedy' technique as to afford a key supporting role a canine cast led by Daki the dachshund.

Recalling Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), this is a typically whimsical, yet incisive satire on mechanised madness that sees Hulot fall foul of both his sister's soulless, state-of-the-art residence and her charmlessly civilised social circle. But while Madame Arpel (Adrienne Servantie) and her hose tycoon husband Charles (Jean-Pierre Zola) fail to fathom Hulot's discomfort in their mod-con milieu, their 10 year-old son Gerard (Alain Bécourt) dotes on the bachelor uncle who strides everywhere in his trademark raincoat and fedora, with a pipe fixed between his teeth, an umbrella clenched in his fist and his trousers flapping defiantly at half-mast.

Gerard particularly enjoys their walks back from school, as Hulot takes him through the very kind of colourful, crowded, cobbled streets that had been demolished to make way for automated monstrosities like Chez Arpel. Tati worked closely with production designer Henri Schmitt to ensure that everything about the place had a newfangledness whose superficial voguishness belied its inconvenience and unusability. Access can only be gained by an electronic gate, while the garden is an offence to nature, whose rigid formalism and phoniness is capped by an aluminium fish that spurts water on the push of a button whenever the family has notable company.

The furniture is equally arriviste and uninviting and Hulot feels as out of place here as he does at Charles's factory, where, on his first day, he manages to produce a hosepipe that resembles a sausage and leave footprints on the personnel manager's desk. Madame Arpel's attempts to matchmake him with a spinster friend prove similarly unsuccessful. Yet Hulot bears nobody any malice and passes no comment on his sister's bourgeois aspirations. Instead, he continues to potter through his own shambolic life, delighting in the song of a neighbour's canary and the flirtatious innocence of the concierge's daughter, Betty (Betty Schneider).

Belying hours of punctilious preparation, each gag seems positively spontaneous as Tati puts progress in its place by extolling the virtues of human contact. The action is virtually wordless, but the meticulously constructed soundtrack is just as crucial to Tati's vision as the physical humour. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and took the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But it would be Tati's last unqualified success, as his artistic ambition began to outstrip his commercial viability.