Main Cast: Jacques Tati, Guy Decomble, Paul Frankeur, Santa Relli, Maine Vallee
Release Year: 1949
Country: FR
Run Time: 79 minutes
Plot
In Jacques Tati's charming -- and essentially plotless -- pre-Hulot first feature, Tati is Francois, a contented and happy postman in a small, unhurried French village. Francois is at ease with his job and leisurely performs his duties, peddling away on his rounds upon his beloved bicycle. Things perk up when a traveling carnival arrives in town. One of the attractions at the carnival is a film depicting the United States Postal Service's fast and efficient postal delivery system. The narrator in the film exhorts, "Rapidite, rapidite." Francois takes up the call, and attempts to Americanize his work style. Intriguingly, Tati originally shot this film in two simultaneous processes - a black-and-white one and an experimental color one called 'Thomson-Color' - but was forced to release the black-and-white when he ran into problems printing the color film; he subsequently tinted select sequences, then in the late 1990s his daughter (a film editor) prepared and released a color version of the entire movie. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Roger Rafal - The hair-dresser; Jacques Beauvais - The coffee-house keeper; Delcassan - The tattler
Credit
René Moulaert - Art Director, Jacques Cottin - Costume Designer, Jacques Tati - Director, Sophie Tatischeff - Editor, Benjamin Bleton - Editor, Camille Laurenti-Ede - Editor, Marcel Moreau - Editor, Jean Yatove - Composer (Music Score), Jacques Mercanton - Cinematographer, Jacques Sauvageot - Cinematographer, Fred Orain - Producer, Michel Chauvin - Producer, Jacques Maumont - Sound/Sound Designer, Jacques Tati - Screenwriter, René Wheeler - Screenwriter, Henri Marquet - Screenwriter
Jour de fête (aka Festival Day, The Big Day) (1949) is the title of a film comedy by the French director Jacques Tati. Jour de fête tells the story of an inept and easily-distracted French mailman who frequently interrupts his duties to converse with the local inhabitants, as well as inspect the traveling fair that has come to his small community. Influenced by too much wine and a newsreel account of rapid transportation methods used by the United States postal system, he goes to hilarious lengths to speed the delivery of mail while aboard his bicycle.
In Jour de fête, several characteristics of Tati's work appear for the first time in a full-length film. The film is largely a visual comedy, though dialogue is still used to tell part of the story, at one point using a background character as a narrator. Sound effects are a key element of the film, as Tati makes imaginative use of voices and other background noises to provide humorous effect. The film introduces what would be a key theme in Tati films, the over-reliance of Western society on technology to solve its (perceived) problems.
The movie was originally filmed in both black-and-white and Thomson-color, an early and untried color film process. In using both formats, Tati feared that Thomson-color might not be practicable, a concern that proved well-founded after the Thomson firm went bankrupt before the film could be processed. Tati then released the black and white version (which features occasional short bursts of colour, hand-coloured by Tati directly onto the frames). In 1995, new technology allowed the restoration of the color copy, which was finished and released by Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff and cinematographer François Ede.
The film was shot largely in the town of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre and the surrounding region; many of the locals played the roles of extras.
