Mr. Hulot's...without dialogue?


My husband and my self both swear we saw the film on TV in the 1950's. Instead of dialogue, each voice was subsituted for by a different musical instrument sound. The funniest, was when Hulot went up the porch stairs to where a group of eldery women were sitting in rocking chairs conversing. The accompaning din produced by the instruments mocking all the voices together was priceless. We also recall his hubcap rolling down the hill on to the top of a grave where it spun several times and then came to rest to the amazament of the mourners gathered round. True of false? We both say we saw it!

Lily

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Hey, sounds funny! Anyone knowing anything about this?

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why don't you just see it again? It gets better with age!!!

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[deleted]

It does and the more I see it the more things I pick up on. Love this movie and want it on Blu-Ray.

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This movie might as well be a *beep* silent film.

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It's not a hubcap; his jalopy had wire wheels and no hubcaps. It was an inner tube which picked up a lot of leaves and was hung on the gravestone as a wreath. It slowly deflated.

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I watched a version about 85 minutes long here in Australia where the vast majority of spoken dialog was in English, and the subtitles barely resembled the dialog. Worse, there were the occasional subtitle where nothing was said at all. In the end, only 10% of the dialog was in French, and the majority of that was nonsensical.

I'm assuming the soundtrack was unadulterated, and that the film has a lot of English/American tourists, and that the film is supposed to play like a silent which tells me to tell you:

Turn off the subtitles, and be happy to know anything you don't understand you weren't supposed to.

Regardless, this film is an embarrassment. It embarrasses the French. It embarrasses Francophiles. It embarrasses its apologists. It's not funny. Its gags are amateurish, with worse editing than Chaplin or Keaton ever released even in a 2-reeler.

The French laugh at Jerry Lewis for God's sake. And the critic elite don't laugh, they just look amongst each other smugly.

Pass on this wasteland. Rent The General. City Lights. Even some crap by Harold Lloyd.

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jt, I'm guessing you saw a copy of the film with the subtitles from the French version burnt into the image, but the so-called "International" audio track playing, which had a lot of English and American voices dubbed in. I can understand why it would seem bizarre to you!!

The original soundtrack is all in French, with the exception of the one older woman who was English - she was the one who was umpiring at the tennis court, and later went in the back of M. Hulot's car when they were supposed to be going to the picnic, and then came and said goodbye to him after all the other hotel guests had snubbed him. If you'd heard the French soundtrack, the subtitles would have fitted all the other dialogue, which was in French.

Anyway. I guess I can see what you're saying, but I really don't agree that this film is an embarrassment. Tati may not have been as technically proficient a filmmaker as, say, Chaplin, but he excelled Chaplin in other ways. He had both a fondness for and an understanding of the follies of humanity, and the ability to portray them, that I don't think Chaplin ever quite grasped. Keaton came closer, I think, but only in the pathos of his own character. The American silent comics were far more about pratfalls and being "zany" – American comedy still is, largely – than about the gentle failings of humanity we saw in Tati's clown, Hulot. Which of them you laugh at is a matter of personal taste, but not an issue of quality.


You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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M. Hulot is not an embarrassment at all, and as a Frenchman in his mid-40s I don't remember ever watching a Jerry Lewis film, let alone laugh at it.
Tati is one of the rare comic film-makers that are told about in philosophy classes and radio programmes, alongside Woody Allen.
Way ahead of his time Tati (who came from a Russian émigré background, an aspect of his culture that must also be considered with Russian famous characters like Oblomov) portrayed mankind and society from an existentialist absurdist point of view that was 180° from the mainstream French comedies of the time that fancied innocent and transparent little characters played by the likes of Bourvil and Fernandel.
You'd have to wait another ten years to see the eccentric Louis de Funès act at his top and well into the 70s to have him dress vitriolic portraits of rich CEOs and businessmen, or an abusive little Spanish lord (yes, De Funès too was of foreign origin, so were Raymond Devos and Coluche, respectively Belgian and Italian, the two greatest stand up comedians of the French stage until the 80s).

You may want to take into consideration that David Lynch considers Les Vacances de M. Hulot as one of his 5 top films list with Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo, Fellini's 8 1/2 and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

The work on the soundtrack is just fabulous, like how different scenes are accompanied by the exact same sounds, or ALL the people (including the viewers during the opening credits) listen to the exact same jazzy tune during all the film - until a child who is the next incarnation of M. Hulot puts on another record that plays a much faster swing. The only alternative programmes broadcast on the radio are political speeches and the stock exchange rates.

Tati's film is one step from horror, and this step is miracle. Consider the burial scene for example. The tyre turning into a floral crown is funny, but the circle of mourners shaking hands with a laughing Hulot is quite unnerving and borderline eerie. When Hulot is fixing his car in the middle of the road and the lorry just hardly misses crushing his legs, it's not funny at all.
Then there's the little boy carrying the ice cream cones. Nothing wrong can happen to him, he's protected by God/angels/whatever, or just his own innocence.

Eventually that's Tati's only "message" to his viewers: keep the child in you, try to see your own life from a child's point of view and even awkward situations (the paint bucket carried randomly by the waves) won't prevent you from reaching your goal - ie fail miserably to bring your little boat - that is your life - to any "serious" destination. So enjoy your life, at the end unexpected people will reveal themselves as your friends while those you wanted to make bonds with (like the pretty blonde) will just return to the anonymous crowd in complete indifference.

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