Hacker Cinema
Jour de fête
1949 · Film · 86 min
Directed by 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.
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3 comments on Hacker News
"…because why would we use machines when we could just walk into a shop and buy cigarettes without ID?"
Exactly, I'm not in France but that practice was pretty common in most Western countries not that many decades ago (see my reply to this post). I didn't mention it but where I am (Australia) it also was pretty common for a kid to go to the shops to pick up cigarettes for, say, a parent.
When I first went to France decades ago (I've relatives in Paris) I found smoking was even more culturally entrenched than where I am, there were posters everywhere for Gitanes, Gauloises and other cigarettes. In fact, France is the home of many classic posters advertising or showing people smoking, many are so good they're now considered works of art.
I've not been to France for some time but I gather in recent years the French's attitude towards smoking has changed dramatically and the practice is now frowned upon culturally—or at least that's my perception from a far. Correct me if I'm wrong.
That's not what I'd have expected (anyway, not to such a degree); unlike the puritanical guilt-ridden English, I'd have thought French culture was more resilient. What brought this change to my attention was the recent kerfuffle over the French icon Jacques Tati's M. Hulot where posters on the Métro were censored—M. Hulot is portrayed sans pipe!
My immediate reaction was 'sacrilege, the vandal who did that had an unmitigated damn hide—what the Hell's going on in France to allow that to happen?'. You see, I'm a great Tati fan and Jour de fête, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle are some of my most loved films—so the 'desecration' affected me personally.
As I've mentioned, I'm a nonsmoker and I applaud the reduction in smoking in recent years but vandalizing a cultural icon is carrying the anti-smoking message too far, it not only rendered M. Hulot's most idiosyncratic characteristic mute, but also make a mockery of the anti smoking message and it's likely to have been counterproductive. If what happened to M. Hulot had occurred in the UK or Righteous America I'd have said 'that's to be expected' but that it occurred in France was a total surprise.
No doubt, there was a backlash from Tati fans. I've not heard the outcome, what occurred in the wash-up?
BTW, As a kid I saw Mon Oncle not long after the film was released and I was enthralled. I never tire of seeing it.
Watch "Jour de fête", by Jacques Tati, 1949. There's a stunt film-in-the-film about this kind of super efficient mail delivery methods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jour_de_f%C3%AAte https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040497/
You really want to see Jacques Tati's "Jour de fête". It's the 14th of July, French national holiday, late 1940s. There is the traditional village fair and party. The village mailman gets inspired by a combination of alcohol consumption and a stunt movie about speedy modern American mail delivery.
An absolutely hilarious prequel to this drone delivery thing, and a must see for people even remotely working on this project or anything similar.