Trafic

Trafic (1971) is Jacques Tati's last outing as the hapless Monsieur Hulot — watch it online on iFILM. A French-Italian co-production written and directed by Tati himself, it sends his gentlest comic creation on one final road trip.

Hulot is chief designer at the Altra car company, and his latest project is a camping van bristling with absurdly ingenious gadgets. Getting it from Paris to a motor show in Amsterdam means a small convoy: the truck carrying the vehicle, an American PR woman, and her fidgety dog. The road, of course, has other plans — traffic jams, breakdowns, a border crossing that drags on forever, a minor crash, and an assortment of strangers who each contribute their own small disaster to the pile.

Released five years after Playtime, the film is quieter and more elegiac, its gags built from observation rather than spectacle. Tati was working on a scale that Hollywood comedy had already abandoned. Stream Trafic (1971) online on iFILM.