Jacques Tati's Trafic

The last film to feature Tati's famous character of Monsieur Hulot, Trafic's exploration of mass car use now seems prescient. Matthew Sweet and guests reassess the film.

Monsieur Hulot is a car designer who takes a chaotic journey to an auto-show in Amsterdam to show off his prototype in this comic film from 1971. It's the last of Jacques Tati's films to feature Hulot, whose name is said to be inspired in part by the French name for Charlie Chaplin's character in The Tramp - Charlot, and whom Rowan Atkinson has cited as an influence on his comic creation Mr Bean. Matthew Sweet discusses Jacques Tati with fellow film historians Adam Scovell, Muriel Zagha and Phuong Le.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

In the Free Thinking archives you can find Matthew discussing other classics such as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vd853
the career of Billy Wilder and his film Fedora https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p1dx
Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001xwd
A long interview with Kevin Brownlow about restoring silent film classics https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z7bn4

Image: Jacques Tati fixes tire in a scene from the film 'Traffic', 1972
Credit: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images

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44 minutes