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Updates: On Location—On the Tati Trail

Tread the footsteps of a classic director to tap the funny bone of France.

 

May is Cannes Film Festival month. Back in 1953, when Jacques Tati won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes for Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), two legends of the French cinema were consecrated: Tati the director and Hulot the character. Three more Hulot movies followed, but 1953’s black-and-white remains the best loved. The world of Tati could not be further from the glamour of the Cannes and the sophistication of the Riviera, and you can still find it on visits to his locations in la France profonde, the heart of France.

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Tati made his first feature in 1947 in sleepy Ste-Sévère-sur-Indre in the folksy Berry, 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Paris. Jour de fête (The Big Day, 1949) starred Tati as François, the village postman, who bicycles madly about amid the Bastille Day festivities. Visiting the village today, you have the sense that the filming was Ste-Sévère’s finest hour and a half. The village square still has its medieval market hall and gate tower, but there are many fewer shops around it and very few people about. It’s a bit ghostly. Up a side street, the butcher’s shop where one of Francois’ manic package deliveries got chopped in two, is still there, in a dazzling 1960s remodeling. But the butcher—one of the happy little boys in the movie—just retired and closed the shop.

A trip from here to Hulot’s Holiday territory is a wonderful drive through the rolling wheat fields and woods of the Berry and the delights of the lower Loire Valley. The route rolls across the amazingly unpopulated wheat fields and woods of the Berry region to the lower Loire Valley [see sidebar], then follows “the royal river” to its Atlantic estuary. Just to the north, in one of many sandy coves separated by pine-topped headlands, lies St-Marc-sur-mer. Here, Tati unleashed Hulot, the gawky, bumbling, pipe-smoking character with too-short trousers that was his work of genius.

At the bare-boarded Hotel de la Plage, Monsieur Hulot proceeds to unwittingly cause havoc. Relaxing with simple pleasures, the pre-affluent French middle class is tormented by the faux pas of this courtly, clumsy twit. Like Jour de fête, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is both a farce and a time capsule, showing how France and the French were five or six decades ago.

What’s changed? Again, to the eye, surprisingly little. St-Marc has more restaurants and guest houses today, but still only the Hotel de la Plage presides over the beach—upgraded but outwardly similar. The beach is much emptier than in the movie: no candy-striped changing huts, no donkey rides. And even on a sunny June Saturday, there are only about a dozen people on the sands. And watching them is Monsieur Hulot. On a deck overlooking the beach, a six-foot-something bronze statue stands arms akimbo, surveying his realm, the officially named Plage de Monsieur Hulot. In the movie, Hulot left town in disgrace. Now he’s the making of it. —Keith Mundy

 

The Lower Loire
The most famous Loire châteaus are found near Blois and Tours. But farther downriver, encountered on the Jacques Tati cross-country drive, are many more attractions, not the least of which are three great castles and many a noble vineyard. Chinon’s dramatic hilltop castle is where Joan of Arc first met the Dauphin. Saumur offers tours of a vast labyrinth of wine cellars, created by the quarrying of limestone for building châteaus. The city Angers boasts a colossal castle in which is displayed an astonishing series of medieval tapestries depicting the Apocalypse. At Clisson, in the Muscadet wine region, a 19th-century visionary created an imitation Tuscan town. Nantes, the western Loire’s biggest city, is elegant with its white stone streets built in the 18th and 19th centuries; the art nouveau La Cigale restaurant is not to be missed.


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