This movie, shot in 1949, was the first of a series of great movies by French comic genius Jacques Tati.
It is a loving view of rural France, a quirky, idiosyncratic France which Tati seems to believe is fast disappearing. This is an elegy -- but it's full of quirky charm and comic zest. There's no solemnity here, just wonderful film-making by the French director/actor who is a natural successor to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. Like all of Tati's movies, this is an almost-silent movie. Instead of speech, Tati uses a pure visual language of cinema.
Tati is best known for his absurdly wonderful character Monsieur Hulot. But here he plays instead a village postman. A travelling circus has come to town, and as one of its attractions, it shows a film praising the new, super-efficient American way of life.
Is the village postman still up to the job? Can he compete with this new modernity? Tati's postman sets out to prove he can kick Gallic ass, harder and better than any American.
This is delicious cinema. Start here, and make sure you continue to trace the career of one of the world's most idiosyncratic and individual of all film-makers.
When Jour de Fete was shot in 1949, Tati was persuaded to attempt to film it in a new and experimental colour process called Thomson Colour.
The process was a dismal failure. Negatives were produced, but colour prints could not be struck from them. Fortunately, Tati had a second camera-crew shooting alongside the colour camera, in old-fashioned black-and-white. And this was the version released back in 1949.
Then, in 1964, Tati revisited Jour de Fete. He hand-tinted the opening titles and many scenes within the movie, and added a character, a painter who observes the village goings-on (and who adds comic reason for some of the hand-tinting). This revised, tinted version is the version most of us have grown up with.
Finally, in the late 1990s, Tati's daughter revisited the orginal colour negatives. And it was found possible to use digital technology to take colour prints from them, and present the movie as Tati intended. The result is a subtle, almost pastel-washed palette of colours which lend the movie an antique charm. She also had the film re-cut to bring it back to the 1949 edited version, eliminating the painter.
The result is a Jour de Fete quite different than Jacques Tati's own final version -- running time is slightly less; some of the scenes are eliminated, but then again, there are some new scenes we've not seen before.
On this disc we gain the colour version only, which is a pity since the differences are quite marked. I also have the French Region Two disc, which is a single flipper-disc, with the colour version on one side, and black-and-white 1964 hand-tinted version on the other, which makes for great comparison.
I'm glad I have both versions of the movie. But if I had to choose one version to live with, it would be this colour version. The transfer is splendid, and the mono sound is clear and bright, and far better than on the 1964 'original'.
The only extras are three teaser trailers for other Tati movies: Playtime, Mon Oncle and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, along with 'Madman propaganda' previews of The Leopard, The Battle of Algiers and La Strada .
