Jacques Tati – Memphis Flyer

It’s looking like a rainy weekend in Memphis. Lucky for you, there’s some new movies out.

Deadpool & Wolverine

The Merc with the Mouth teams up with Canada’s favorite mutant to repair a rift in the multiverse. Ryan Reynolds returns as Deadpool, the only Marvel comic book character who knows he’s in a comic book — or in this case, a movie. Hugh Jackman comes out of superhero retirement to reprise his role as Wolverine. This time he’s wearing that fetching yellow outfit Logan wore in the comics, but was deemed too cheesy for the screen. This is the first R-rated Marvel movie, so expect some cussin’.

The Fabulous Four

Bette Midler’s getting married in Key West, and her college besties Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph are on coming to the party. This outrageous road trip will rekindle friendships and open old wounds.

Longlegs

The art horror sleeper hit directed by Osgood Perkins is the creepy slow burn you’re looking for. Maika Monroe stars as an FBI agent, who may or may not be psychic, assigned to a case that has stumped the agency for decades. Nicolas Cage delivers a tour de force performance as a satanic serial killer with a glam rock fetish. This film is even weirder than it sounds, and I mean that in a good way. Read my full review.

PlayTime

The eyes of the world are on Paris this week, as the City of Light hosts the Summer Olympics. So it’s an appropriate time for Crosstown Arts’ film series to feature one of the great masterpieces of French film. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime is something rare: an epic comedy. Shooting over the course of three years in the 1960s on gigantic sets built to mimic (and mock) the glass and steel architecture that was taking over Paris at the time, it was the most expensive French film ever made. It’s nearly wordless, nearly plotless, and hilariously slapstick.

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953/1978; dir. Jacques Tati)—It’s finally summer time, which means it’s finally time for you ditch your job for a while and have a little fun in the sun. Yet in today’s entertainment- and distraction-crazed modern world, trying to have fun is often as spirit-trampling as several weekends’ worth of unpaid overtime. For far too many people, Gang of Four’s question remains unanswerable: “The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure?”

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati’s take on the agonies of vacation, accurately diagnoses this condition. His film also offers some potential remedies—but he’d never dream of telling you which set pieces represent the problem and which ones represent the way out. Tati’s sweetly funny, discreetly melancholy second feature also introduces the heroically indifferent Mr. Hulot (played by Tati himself)—an inscrutable middle-aged Frenchman loved by children, tolerated by dogs and almost always out of step with the uptight, status-conscious, overly busy, overly bourgie adults around him. Hulot says maybe two dozen words during the film, but his tottering, stiff-legged physical comedy mirrors the sheepish timidity and brazen entitlement in foreign places that distinguish tourists from locals the world over. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday is also an epic of absent-mindedness and misunderstanding; it unfolds in a sunny climate but is aided by a steady drizzle of visual and auditory jokes that don’t register as jokes until you’ve watched the movie a half-dozen times. (One of my favorite gags relies on the Orion’s-belt symmetry of a phonograph record, the back of Hulot’s head, and a piano stool.) Just like your own vacation, it’s restorative and boring and aimless and overplanned and too long and not long enough.
Grade: A