TRAFIC

Jacques Tati's "Trafic" is an almost plotless series of visual gags, all of them inspired and the best of them among the finest in Tati's oeuvre, yet the film was not a critical success and remains hugely underrated. This time Hulot is taking a 'camping car' from Belgium to the Amsterdam Motor Show and naturally causes havoc wherever he goes, (the film has the most beautifully choreographed and balletic car-crash in the movies).

Tati was, of course, the greatest visual comic since Chaplin and Keaton but unlike the great silent comics he had the virtue of sound at his fingertips and perhaps no director used sound effects with the same degree of brilliance that Tati does here. Dialogue, while not necessarily kept to a minimum, is again mostly redundant. But then words were never what Tati was about; you can watch his films without the benefit of subtitles and still understand them. This may not be in the same class as "Les Vacances De M Hulot" but it's essential nevertheless.