Synopsis
Jour de Fête (1949) is Jacques Tati's first feature film — a French village comedy you can watch online on iFILM. A travelling fair rolls into a sleepy town for a single afternoon, and François the postman, played by Tati himself, gets caught up in the commotion.
After watching a short film about the blazing efficiency of the American postal system, and after a few too many glasses of wine, François decides his own bicycle-powered route needs a radical upgrade. His frantic attempts to deliver mail at top speed produce a string of gags built almost entirely on physical timing and spatial comedy — very little dialogue, a great deal of falling off bikes. The film is the direct ancestor of the Monsieur Hulot films that followed: the same affectionate eye on small-town French life, the same gentle chaos, and Tati already fully in command of the screen. An eighty-six-minute masterclass in silent-era craft made with sound.
Stream Jour de Fête (1949) online on iFILM.
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