Harking back to the bucolic pleasures that were prominent in Tati’s first two features, Trafic posits aimless and haphazard drift as a meaningful alternative to capitalist compulsiveness. This helps to explain why documentary (including much of the footage of motorists Tati took over from his initial codirector, Bert Haanstra) becomes a part of his artistic palette here, at the same time that hippies are welcomed into his social universe. Both become even more prominent in Parade.

Critic Michel Chion writes that Trafic recounts “a journey between two places, neither of which really exists,” adding that “Paris is a motorway exit and a corner of a square fleetingly glimpsed; Amsterdam is reduced to an exhibition hall. Only the journey is real.” To which one might add that the only place in Trafic that feels very real is a Dutch garage beside a canal where nothing much happens (apart from some casual repair work, and a rather malicious if well-developed gag about a hippie coat made to resemble Maria’s equally fluffy dog).

If the weakest portions of Playtime are the demonstrations of absurd gadgets at a trade show, the parallel weak spots here appear not at the Amsterdam auto exhibition––where Tati can indulge in such formal delights as the rhythmic games he plays with the opening and closing of various trunks and hoods––but at the police office in Holland, where the absurd fixtures of the camper are duly (and dully) trotted out for the customs inspectors and us. But alongside the canal, there are a few privileged moments when plotlines are forgotten, time seems to stop, and the improvisations that grow out of casual observations begin. This is also the stretch when Maria spills ink on her sunglasses. Trafic might be said to take an easy breath here, and so do we.