Tati's first feature film (he has made some shorts before) from 1949 is about an inept bicycle riding postman (Tati himself, of course) trying to adopt more efficient ways of delivering mail in a quaint French rural village, after watching a documentary of the American postal system. One must say first that the gags here are not as good or as funny as in Tati's later films (especially Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle). Still, this is worth seeing, especially in its color version (Tati was disappointed with its primitive color system, so he finally decided to release the film on black and white; the color version of the film was restored and released to the public many years later, after Tati's death). What is more striking of the movie when one sees it now is to look, even in a color that leaves much to be desired, at a rural France that no longer exists.
Review of Jour de Fête
