Parade (1974) - film review

An excited audience of men, women and children take their seats in a circus tent, eager for the spectacle to begin.  The genial Monsieur Loyal greets everyone with an invitation that all are welcome to join in the show.  A cavalcade of acrobats, clowns and singers appear to entertain one and all.  Too soon, the show is over, and two small children explore the remnants of the evening’s amusements backstage...

In the course of twenty-six years, Jacques Tati made only six full-length films, yet his contribution to French cinema is immense.  Each of these six films is a timeless comedy jewel, offering a view of life that is quite unlike anything any other filmmaker has come up with.  The universe of Jacques Tati is unique – with a childlike innocence and subtle blending of the everyday with the surreal.  Tati himself appears in each of his films, and shows that he is a comic performer of considerable talent, easily in the same league as those other comedy magicians of the Twentieth Century, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

The main reason why Jacques Tati made so few films was his almost manic perfectionism.  His exigencies and fastidiousness as a director were to prove to be his downfall.  Virtually bankrupted by the commercial failure off his most ambitious film, Playtime (1967), Tati had great difficulty attracting funding for any further projects.  His final film, Parade , was made for Swedish television on a shoestring budget, and sees Tati return to the boisterous music hall world in which he began his career as a mime artist in the 1930s.  Tati had planned to make another film after this, Confusion , but died before he could get the project off the ground.

Parade differs markedly from Tati’s other five films, most notably in that it has no plot, no apparent structure and is closer in form to the style of a documentary.  The film is deceptively simple, depicting a circus show with the minimum of cinematic embellishment.  For all its simplicity, Parade has an inexplicable hold on the spectator; it evokes a very strong sense of warmth and good-feeling, which comes partly from a feeling of nostalgia (for anyone who has ever attended a live circus show) and also from Tati’s unerring ability to capture little moments of pure magic, such as two small children forming an instant rapport.

Parade looks crude and unstructured, almost as if the whole thing was improvised in one evening, but this is  just part of Tati’s illusion.  Every moment of this film is meticulously constructed with skill and intelligence.  Part of the appeal of the circus is that the acts look spontaneous, but the audience knows that endless preparation has preceded each performance.  The genius of Tati is that his behind-the-scenes perfectionism rarely reveals itself on screen; it is like the mechanism of some great ornate clock, hidden from the viewer, but responsible for something we can instantly appreciate.

In Parade, Tati completely removes the boundary between spectator and performer.  The reactions and contributions of the audience are as much a part of the film as the circus acts are, making the point that without an audience, art would have no value and no meaning.   This importance of the relationship between performer and spectator is something which Tati would have learned early in his career as a music hall artiste, and it is theme which runs through all of his films, most noticeably in Parade.  The art of comedy is not to get an audience to laugh at you; it is to get an audience to love you – and this is what Tati achieved, with effortless brilliance, throughout his career.

© James Travers 2007

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