Soigne ton gauche (1936)

Soigne ton gauche is a French film comedy first released in 1936, directed by René Clément.  The film stars Jacques Tati, Max Martel, Louis Robur, Cliville and J. Aurel.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


On a farm in rural France, a sports coach is training two boxers for a forthcoming match when disaster strikes.  One of his boxers is knocked out during a training bout and, to continue training the coach needs to find a replacement – fast.  He notices a young farmhand, an obvious boxing enthusiast, miming a boxing match by himself in a barn, and persuades him to enter the makeshift boxing ring.  With only his enthusiasm and a teach-yourself book to help him, the farmhand throws everything he has into the phoney boxing match.  With a little help from the village postman and his cronies, our hero pulls off a spectacular victory, only to land an unexpected blow from his mother...

This early film, written and starring France’s master of comedy, Jacques Tati, was directed by René Clément, a man who is not often associated with slapstick comedy.   Years before he became a household name in France for his comic film creations, François the postman and Monsieur Hurlot, Tati was a popular comic performer on stage.  This film features one of his most successful pre-WWII stage routines, that of the boxing fanatic taking on an imaginary (invisible?) opponent.

Whilst not quite vintage Tati material, Soigne ton gauche features some side-splitting sequences which makes it a hugely entertaining and memorable short film.  You wonder why Tati took so long to make a name for himself in cinema, when, on the basis of his performance in this film, he clearly has at least nine-tenths of the talent of those other great film slapstick comedians, Charlie Chaplin and Buston Keaton.  The film’s closing scene, with the comic country postman cycling off into the distance, seems to presage Tati’s first notable work as a director, L’École des facteurs, made a decade later.

© James Travers 2002

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