Given the size of his achievement, it’s astonishing that Jacques Tati made only half a dozen features, none of them bad. But if I had to single out any of these as a lesser work, I’d pick Trafic (1971), the only one that qualifies as compromised.

Others might select Parade (1973), Tati’s final film––because it was mainly shot on video and virtually dispenses with plot by basically following the contours of a far-from-spectacular circus performance. But they’d be wrong. Though it’s the least known Tati feature and the most modest in terms of budget, Parade is by no means Tati’s least ambitious or adventurous film. In some ways it even qualifies as his most radical––in its refusal to clearly separate life from spectacle or prioritize professional performers over unprofessional spectators. Unfortunately, the less analytical and more sentimental celebrations of Tati––including the charming 1989 documentary by the late Sophie Tatischeff about her father, In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot, that’s a bonus on the second disc here––tend to overlook this radicalism.

Trafic, on the other hand, represented a conscious step backward for Tati. Because, as the opening credits plainly state, the film stars “Mr. Hulot,” this was already contrary to the direction he wanted to move in. He told me that when I interviewed him for Film Comment in November 1972. And when I briefly went to work for him the following January, it was obvious that Playtime (1967), his greatest film, was also the one he was proudest of. Not that he repudiated Trafic, but he stressed it was a film he could have made before Playtime. (Anecdotal aside: During this period, long after the French premiere of Trafic, I learned that Tati had recently gone back and added an entire jokey subplot to the available prints––something he’d also done for a rerelease of the 1953 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot during the 1970s, when he inserted a single new gag alluding to Jaws. In this case, the addition was far more elaborate––the recurring motif of a filling station handing out busts of dignitaries to customers.)