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Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot | |
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Les Vacances de M. Hulot | |
Directed by | Jacques Tati |
Written by | Jacques Tati Henri Marquet |
Produced by | Fred Orain Jacques Tati |
Starring | Jacques Tati Nathalie Pascaud Micheline Rolla |
Cinematography | Jacques Mercanton Jean Mousselle |
Edited by | Suzanne Baron Charles Bretoneiche Jacques Grassi |
Music by | Alain Romans |
Distributed by | DisCina |
Release date |
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Running time | 98 minutes (1953 version) 86 minutes (1978 version) |
Country | France |
Language | French |
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (French : Les Vacances de M. Hulot; released as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday in the US) is a 1953 French comedy film starring and directed by Jacques Tati. It introduced the pipe-smoking, well-meaning but clumsy character of Monsieur Hulot, who appears in Tati's subsequent films, including Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971). The film gained an international reputation for its creator when released in 1953. The film was very successful, totalling 5,071,920 ticket sales in France. [1]
This article needs an improved plot summary.(August 2023) |
Following scenes of chaotic departures from an unnamed railway station and bus stop, Monsieur Hulôt, an apparent bachelor of comedic gait, is seen driving his rudimentary 1924 Salmson AL car to his beachside holiday (French 'vacances') hotel. He battles with both hills and more modern cars along the way. On his arrival at the hotel he causes chaos when he opens the door during a stiff sea breeze. The rest of the film shows other guests at the hotel, together with a very attractive resident of a boarding house up the road, interacting with Hulôt and each other, with Hulôt causing more comedic chaos throughout.
Christopher Lee provided all the voices for the English dub of the film. [2]
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For the most part, in Les Vacances, spoken dialogue is limited to the role of background sounds. Combined with frequent long shots of scenes with multiple characters, Tati believed that the results would tightly focus audience attention on the comical nature of humanity when interacting as a group, as well as his own meticulously choreographed visual gags. However, the film is by no means a 'silent' comedy, as it uses natural and man-made sounds not only for comic effect but also for character development.
The film was made in both French and English language versions. While Tati had experimented with color film in Jour de fête,Les Vacances is black and white. The jazz score, mostly variations on the theme "Quel temps fait-il à Paris", [3] was written by Alain Romans.
Les Vacances was shot in the town of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, which lies on the edge of the industrial port of Saint-Nazaire, in the Département of Loire-Atlantique. Tati had fallen in love with the beguiling coastline while staying in nearby Port Charlotte with his friends, M. and Mme Lemoine, before the war and resolved to return one day to make a film there. Tati and his crew turned up in the summer of 1951, "took over the town and then presented it to the world as the quintessence of French middle-class life as it rediscovered its rituals in the aftermath of the Second World War." [4] "Neither too big nor too small, [St Marc fit the bill] - a sheltered inlet, with a graceful curve of sand, it boasted a hotel on the beach, L'Hotel de la Plage, on which the main action could be centred. Beach huts, windbreaks, fishing boats and outcrops of rock helped to complete a picture which was all the more idyllic for being so unspectacular." A bronze statue of Monsieur Hulot was later erected and overlooks the beach where the film was made.
On its release in the United States, Bosley Crowther wrote that the film contained "much the same visual satire that we used to get in the 'silent' days from the pictures of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and such as those." He said the film "exploded with merriment" and that Tati "is a long-legged, slightly pop-eyed gent whose talent for caricaturing the manners of human beings is robust and intense...There is really no story to the picture...The dialogue...is at a minimum, and it is used just to satirize the silly and pointless things that summer people say. Sounds of all sorts become firecrackers, tossed in for comical point." [5]
Tati biographer David Bellos has described the film as "Sublime" and stated "It was through this film that I first fell in love with France. I think that is true of a lot of people." The journalist Simon O'Hagan, on the occasion of the film's 50th anniversary in 2003, wrote that the film "might contain the greatest collection of sight gags ever committed to celluloid, but it is the context in which they are placed and the atmosphere of the film that lift it into another realm. The central character is an unforgettable amalgam of bafflement at the modern world, eagerness to please and just the right amount of eccentricity - i.e. not too much - his every effort to fit in during his seaside holiday merely succeeds in creating chaos out of orderliness. Puncturing the veneer of the comfortably off at play is by no means the least of Tati's concerns. But, [there is] an elegiac quality [too], the sense that what Tati finds funny he also cherishes." [6]
The film was entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. [7]
The film's comic influence has extended well beyond France and can be found as recently as 2007 in the Rowan Atkinson comic vehicle Mr. Bean's Holiday . [8]
Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result | Ref. |
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Academy Awards | Best Story and Screenplay | Jacques Tati and Henri Marquet | Nominated | [9] |
Cannes Film Festival | Palme d'Or | Jacques Tati | Nominated | [10] |
Louis Delluc Prize | Best Film | Won | ||
National Board of Review Awards | Top Foreign Films | 8th Place | [11] | |
New York Film Critics Circle Awards | Best Foreign Language Film | Nominated | [12] |
Three versions of the film ended up being done. Tati withdrew the original 1953 version in 1959 while a second version was done in 1962 that was later taken out of circulation to be held in escrow due to his bankruptcy in 1967. In 1978, Tati reissued the film with twelve minutes trimmed to go with re-arrangement of certain shots (which went with a new arrangement of the main theme) to go along with new footage shot in Saint-Marc-sur-mer that he labeled as the definitive version of the film prior to his death in 1982. The 1978 version is labeled by the Les Films de Mon Oncle as the "definitive" version of the film. Only the original and 1978 version are available on home video. [14]
Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time, although he directed only six feature-length films.
Mr. Bean's Holiday is a 2007 comedy film directed by Steve Bendelack and written by Hamish McColl and Robin Driscoll, from a story penned by Simon McBurney. Based on the British sitcom series Mr. Bean created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, it is a standalone sequel to Bean (1997). The film stars Atkinson as Mr. Bean, with Maxim Baldry, Emma de Caunes, Willem Dafoe and Karel Roden in supporting roles. In the film, Mr. Bean wins a trip to Cannes, France, but on his way there, he is mistaken for a kidnapper and meets an award-winning filmmaker after he travels with both a Russian filmmaker's son and an aspiring actress in tow.
Mon Oncle is a 1958 comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. The first of Tati's films to be released in colour, Mon Oncle won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Special Prize at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film, receiving more honours than any of Tati's other cinematic works.
Alain Romans was a French jazz composer. He studied in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. His teachers included Vincent d'Indy. He later worked with Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt.
Monsieur Hulot is a character created and played by French comic Jacques Tati for a series of films in the 1950s through the early '70s, namely Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Trafic (1971). The character of Hulot also appears briefly in François Truffaut's Bed & Board (1970).
Playtime is a 1967 satirical comedy film directed and co-written by Jacques Tati. Tati also stars in the film, reprising the role of Monsieur Hulot from his earlier films Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958). However, Tati grew ambivalent towards playing Hulot as a recurring central role during production, and he appears intermittently in Playtime, alternating between central and supporting roles.
The Carlton Cannes, a Regent Hotel is a historic 332-room luxury hotel opened in 1911, located at 58 La Croisette in Cannes on the French Riviera. It is famous for hosting movie stars from around the world during the annual Film Festival. Following major renovations, it reopened on 13 March 2023.
Trafic (Traffic) is a 1971 Italian-French comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. Trafic was the last film to feature Tati's famous character of Monsieur Hulot, and followed the vein of earlier Tati films that lampooned modern society.
Jacques Cottin was a French costume designer whose films included Jour de fête (1949), Mon oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967), for Jacques Tati. In 1970 he had a cameo in François Truffaut's Bed and Board, playing the character of Monsieur Hulot, made famous by Tati.
The Illusionist is a 2010 animated film written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. The film is based on an unproduced script written by French mime, director and actor Jacques Tati in 1956. Controversy surrounds Tati's motivation for the script, which was written as a personal letter to his estranged eldest daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, in collaboration with his long-term writing partner Henri Marquet, between writing for the films Mon Oncle and Play Time.
Pierre Étaix was a French clown, comedian and filmmaker. Étaix made a series of short- and feature-length films, many of them co-written by influential screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. He won an Academy Award for best live action short film in 1963. Due to a legal dispute with a distribution company, his films were unavailable from the 1970s until 2009.
The French Syndicate of Cinema Critics has, each year since 1946, awarded a prize, the Prix Méliès, to the best French film of the preceding year. More awards have been added over time: the Prix Léon Moussinac for the best foreign film, added in 1967; the Prix Novaïs-Texeira for the best short film, added in 1999; prizes for the best first French and best first foreign films, added in 2001 and 2014, respectively; etc.
The 6th Cannes Film Festival was held from 15 to 29 April 1953. The Grand Prix of the Festival went to The Wages of Fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Saint-Marc-sur-Mer is a seaside resort in France, situated in the commune of Saint-Nazaire. It is located 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) to the west of the center of the town of Saint-Nazaire, of which it is a district. Originally named Crépelet, at the end of the 19th century it was given the name of the saint to whom its chapel was dedicated.
Julien Henri Carette was a French film actor. He appeared in more than 120 films between 1931 and 1964.
Jean-Paul Roussillon was a French actor. He appeared in more than 80 films and television shows between 1954 and 2008. He starred in the film Playing 'In the Company of Men', which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. He won the César Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in A Christmas Tale. For years Roussillon had been battling lung cancer and died on 31 July 2009 in Auxerre, France.
Suzanne Baron was a French film editor active from the 1950s through the 1990s. She edited her first film in 1952. Baron is known for her collaborations with filmmakers like Louis Malle and Werner Herzog.
Hulot may refer to:
Emmanuel Debarre was a French sculptor. He focused mostly on abstract art.
DisCina was a French film production and distribution company established in 1938 by Michel Safra and André Paulvé. It reached its peak during the 1940s and early 1950s, remaining active during the Occupation of France.