Parade

This feels like a combination of Jacques Tati's sense of humor, an experiment from Ingmar Bergman, and the storytelling format of Federico Fellini. When Roger Ebert reviewed the film he called it a doodle, and I think that's a very good way to distill Tati's final effort, made for Swedish television. Effectively a variety show, it's a series of disconnected comedic bits and ideas without much of an anchor to it. There are fun bits throughout, but without any sort of throughline with a story of some kind, it becomes a mere balancing act between those that are good that get countered by those that aren't so good. It's a mixed bag. It's a doodle.

An audience arrives at a theater, a circus, and they filter into their seats. They are met by their master of ceremonies (Tati) who announces that the audience will be part of the show as well before going into a couple of mime routines around sports (tennis and boxing) that demonstrate Tati's wonderful physical abilities. Trained as a mime decades prior, he makes good on the promise of one man boxing against a phantom opponent. His bits are probably the highlight of the film. They're the kind of delightful comedy that defined his earlier films, and they often feel like Tati simply making it up as he goes along (though I imagine them to be highly practiced and precisely choreographed).

The rest of the bits have some charm, the best of them probably being the duel between a magician and a workman who just wanders onto the stage from his workspace off to the side (half-lit because we're supposed to see them there as part of the show). The magician does some simple sleight of hand that the workman shows him up by doing similar, but more spectacular, things. It all ends with someone from the audience doing a trick with a cane and a handkerchief that is better than the rest, followed by a girl popping out of a box unexpectedly and the workman messing up the disappearance of a microwave in comedic fashion.

There's an extended bit with a mule where members of the audience try to ride it, all failing, until a little boy offers the mule a treat after which the mule lets him on. It's an overextended bit that's never really funny and an ending that's not really all that much more than thinly sweet. There's a juggling bit where three workmen juggle large brushes in a variety of ways (including the three standing atop each other's shoulders) that's fairly impressive. There's a running gag of a group of physical performers in different costumes, depending on the larger bit around them (marching band, rock band, orchestra) that always end up with them vaulting over the piano which is actually a flat pommel horse and trampoline. It's amusing the first time and less so every other time.

I hope I've painted the disarray of sights and sounds that is the show. There are bits that are funny. There are bits that are not. In and out of it walks Tati, miming a man riding a horse or showing what traffic police are like from different countries (probably his funniest moment). As a variety show, it's intermittently amusing. I think there's supposed to be something in the end about clowning getting people, in particular children, getting interested in the arts because two children that had been highlighted throughout the film end up walking onto the now empty stage and playing with the paint and hammers and balloons left around. It's an idea, not much of one, but it's still there.

There's honestly not much to say about the film because there's not much there outside the surface. It feels like a relatively cheap way for Tati to have one more effort at a film, adapting some of his stage work into a television special for another country. Filmed on video (and looking not all that great for it), except for a handful of shots filmed on 16mm, Tati's final feature length film is an intermittent entertainment that is the roughest form of his humor without the long, hard effort to hammering it into something much smoother and cohesive. It's worth a few chuckles.

PARADE is basically the presentation of a circus performance, in which artistes interact with the audience in a series of set pieces - juggling acts, tightrope walks, clowning, balloon fights, plus one or two routines in which Tati demonstrates his remarkable talent for mime. The film's artificialities are evident: we see cardboard cutouts of members of the audience among live-action actors, while the performers sometimes talk to inanimate objects. Tati's purpose, although not overtly stated, seems to be to show how life is like a circus, with all of us indulging in a series of ritualized actions which, although meaningful in themselves, can also be considered absurd. This is definitely true of some of his set-pieces - for example the very funny routine where he imitates a boxer going into a championship bout. However, a series of routines do not necessarily make for an entertaining film: some of the performances involving actors other than Tati are distinctly second- rate, while the audience - when Tati's camera shows them in close-up - sometimes look thoroughly bored with the proceedings, despite the enthusiastic applause on the soundtrack. Judged by his previous oeuvre, PARADE is sadly a very second-rate piece: one feels sad that the great director could not have bowed out on a more positive note.

This is a collection of circus acts with a fair bit of Tati's miming thrown in for good measure.

It's not a BAD film. Some memorable sequences include Tati miming a tennis game (in slow motion!) and traffic cops around the world. I don't think the M. Hulot character let Tati really stretch out and MIME. He is very very good.

The other performers and comedians, while not as famous as Tati, are still pretty good.

The main problem is that the premise is so basic. You can't really GO very far with this and Tati doesn't. It's basically just like watching a circus on TV. There's nothing to really glue the whole picture together.

I agree with the reviewer that found the audiences 70's clothing interesting in itself.

Tati was really going for something here, but I'm not quite sure what. He's being so subtle here that I couldn't really tell what his point was.

The film is all about a circus, with performances by clowns, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, a band, and Jacques Tati. The different scenes vary in worth - the jugglers are awesome, but there's one sequence, where people try to jump on a pony and a donkey, that's very cruel to animals (although it ends wonderfully). One of the bigger disappointments of the film are Jacques Tati's mimes. Not that they're bad, but Tati fans have already seen them all. He impersonates a football player, a boxer, a tennis player, a fisherman, and an equestrian. This is how he first got famous in the 30s and 40s, by impersonating sportsmen, but at 70 something, his miming isn't as great anymore. And we've seen them all the way back to Watch Your Left and up to The Night Course.

The action isn't just of the circus performers. Tati also goes behind the scenes of the circus and especially to the audience. A lot of the film, in fact, observes the audience. We get to know several of them as characters.

The ending is quite great. It has the same bittersweet tone that all of Tati's endings have. I actually teared up a little, but that was mostly because I knew that this was the last time "Une film de Jacques Tati" would ever appear on screen. I didn't love Parade, but I certainly liked it. 7/10.

Jacques Tati's swansong is an affectionate return to roots, recreating some of the vaudeville routines of his past on stage at a Swedish circus, in a short program originally made for Scandinavian TV. Tati himself, serving as ringmaster for the troupe of acrobats and clowns, puts his aging but still limber body on display during a transitional set of solo pantomime turns. The show is frequently hilarious (some of the audience interaction with the performers is clearly not unscripted), but as a farewell effort of a comic genius responsible for some of the biggest laughs since the glory days of silent film comedy it can certainly come as an anti-climax. And because the stage show was 'filmed' using a crude early video process, it almost resembles a bootleg live rehearsal for the next, never made Tati feature.