What it’s about: Among a group of beachgoing tourists descending upon a seaside town on France’s northern coast is Monsieur Hulot (Tati). Towering and clumsy, but formal and timid, he seems to have difficulty fitting into either the physical space or the social order around him as he stumbles from incident to incident. He putters about in his weird little backfiring car, falling in with a scouting group, experiencing a kayaking misadventure, dominating a tennis match with an unusual technique, accidentally participating in a funeral, and so on. The holiday culminates in an impromptu fireworks display the night before everyone returns to their ordinary lives.

Reflections: A first-time watch, but not my first exposure to Tati, so I had a sense of what I was in for. The film makes clever use of sound, but its core sensibility is drawn from silent comedy–not for nothing did Tati start his career as a mime. Dialogue is sparse–indeed, an early gag featuring announcements over a train-station loudspeaker electronically mangled to incomprehensibility warns the audience not to rely on language–and the film leans almost wholly on often-elaborate physical, visual gags. For all his gentility, Hulot is fundamentally a disturbance to the machinery of everything around him and words, exposition, or plot mechanics are all incidental to the almost visceral pleasure of just watching that play out.

This is a canon film that’s been analyzed to death–I remember reading Bazin’s breathless praise in grad school–but there is a lot going on here. Tati was a sharp observer of post-war France and there are a lot of thematic ideas one could point to through that lens: while the other characters have clear backstories and social roles, Hulot himself is a undefined cypher, suggesting a culture grappling with an unknown identity in the wake of occupation and devastation. Or the way in which echoes of the war reverberate through the old veteran (Dubois) and his reminiscences or the pseudo-bombing attack of the whole fireworks escapade and the kind of reclamation and neutralization of that. Or the film’s weird pacing–the way it’s kind of suspended, following meandering side-paths and anticipating the Nouvelle Vague’s fractured relationship to cinematic time. Or the whole “scatterbrained angel” aspect–how Hulot presents a humor completely without cruelty in a way that stood out in its time and reflected a kind of midcentury modernist, Utopian outlook.

All of that is there, but you don’t actually have to care about any of it to enjoy this. It reminds me of the kind of movie my mom would show me as a kid–something that both a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old could find funny, but with a classic sense of sophistication to it. It is a movie from the ’50s, it’s not gonna grab your attention and pummel your dopamine receptors, but it’s fun and smart, and has a kind of warm-hearted sweetness to it that not only holds up, but goes a long way in our current world.