No two Tati features are alike––and, as Jonathan Romney observes in his thoughtful liner notes, no two Hulots are alike, either. The character was initially supposed to appear in only one feature, Tati’s second (after his 1949 Jour de fête), and was brought back reluctantly in Mon oncle (1958) because of public demand; this time Tati gave him a visible home and suburban relatives, took away his rattling car, and suggested he was unemployable, even if he had a benign influence on his nephew. (Meanwhile, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday was a bigger commercial smash than Jour de fête, and Mon oncle was still bigger, winning Tati his only Oscar.) Then, after the demand for Hulot continued unabated, he tried multiplying this character in Playtime, still apparently unemployed, into a series of look-alikes, trying to convey the notion that it was everyone, not this single dopey-looking guy, who was supposed to be funny. He even made sure that Hulot’s parting gift to the heroine, a bouquet of plastic flowers, was delivered by one of his younger doubles while Hulot himself was about to dissolve into a street crowd. But after Playtime tanked and drove Tati into bankruptcy, to finance another feature he was forced to bring back Hulot and make him more prominent again. So Tati made him the designer of a rather ridiculous camper that he and others try in vain to transport from Paris to an Amsterdam auto show. In short, his bankability as an actor––more specifically, as one of his roles as an actor––had to supersede his ambitions as a director.

Which may account for why Trafic is the only Tati film with any traces of anger. Many of the bad vibes cluster around Maria (Maria Kimberley), an ill-mannered p.r. rep and posturing fashion plate who personifies the rush leading to multiple mishaps and one rather spectacular auto accident. The fact that Maria typically makes sharp right-angle turns when she walks already marks her as a villainess, at least according to the geometrical ethics of Playtime, where lackadaisical, accidental curves are signs of humanity triumphing over architectural regimentation. A somewhat more sympathetic view of her finally emerges by the end, after she accidentally spills ink on her glasses in the Dutch rural garage––and when she becomes Hulot’s escort in the rain in the final sequence, culminating in the bittersweet melancholy of the final shot, which seems to view humanity itself as a bemused tribe lost in a senseless labyrinth.