Trafic - Criterion Collection

Buy This Item Trafic - Criterion Collection by Criterion  Available from Amazon  $27.99  on 8-26-2008     At last! This little gem gets the release it deserves, from Criterion no less. Regarded by many and perhaps rightly so as the weakest of the Jacques Tati 'Hulot' films. Don't let this put you off as, even though its the weakest, its still the work of genius. It's a surprise it even got made as it was fraught with finance problems, production being shut down due to lack of money was not rare. Unfortunately Tati did not receive the critical acclaim he was due until many years after his death. The rights of his films landed in the hands of strangers due to bankruptcy and then Tati died. Trafic has never seen a proper DVD release in the English language territories. I own a German edition that sports a good picture and little else. Criterion I'm sure will deliver the goods! Reader Reviews Best known for Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971), French comic genius Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot comedies depict a socially-inept, Quixotic character always in his rumpled raincoat and tattered brown hat, at odds with the mechanistic and materialistic modern world. In fact, Hulot's life is one big misadventure in the modern world. Trafic (Traffic) was Tati's last Hulot film, and followed themes established in his earlier films. In Trafic, Monsieur Hulot (Tati) invents a Rube-Goldberg camper van fully loaded with modern features (equipped, for instance, with a shaver in the steering wheel), and then travels to an auto show in Amsterdam with a tres-trendy marketing exec named Maria (Maria Kimberly), to introduce the car for their Parisian employer, Altra Motors. Along the way, they encounter many of the everyday frustrations that seem to plague modern existence: a flat tire, an accident, an encounter with the police, car repairs, and several traffic jams. There is something hilarious just in the notion of a Luddite like Hulot working as an auto designer. Tati's Trafic is a true comic masterpiece, and the perfect antidote for these harried times. Special features included in the double-disc edition of Trafic include a newly restored high-definition transfer; "In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot" (1989), a two-hour documentary tracing the evolution of Jacques Tati's beloved alter ego; an interview from 1971 with the cast of Trafic, from the French television program Le journal de cinéma; "The Comedy of Jacques Tati," a 1973 episode from the French television program Morceaux de bravoure; the theatrical trailer; and a new essay by film critic Jonathan Romney. G. Merritt

Trafic - Criterion Collection Available from Amazon Price: $27.99 Updated on 8-26-2008.

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