Mr. Hulot=s Vacation (Tati, 1953) is a French comedy with a light touch.
             The film seems to exist in a time-warp of sorts, depicting a period when
             French and British tourists mingled on the beach at small resorts with
             little pretension to be big resorts. The technique of the film is
             observational from first to last, as if someone had left a camera out on
             the beach and waited for the roaming M. Hulot to come among and behave
             oddly in the face of all the different problems associated with a short
             From the opening frames of the waves quietly coming into shore, the
             film has an easy-going attitude which suggests a vacation, and while much
             goes wrong in the course of the film, it is generally of a much quieter
             sort of chaos than would be seen in the average American film about a
             vacation going wrong. The film is essentially a silent film, with much
             owed to the works of Chaplin in America and Max Linder in France, but it is
             not really a silent film and makes clever use of sound to convey meaning,
             create and sustain a mood, and point out contrasting attitudes from moment
             to moment. For instance, the quiet opening marked only by the soothing
             music and the even more soothing sound of the waves washing ashore is held
             for a moment as a boat on the beach just sits and waits. There is then a
             quick cut to the train station where the noisy vacationers are arriving,
             carrying suitcases, yelling to one another, seeming like children herded
             from place to place with no clear sense of where they are going. The
             soothing sounds of the beach shift to the jarring and ongoing din of the
             train station, two aspects of a vacation, the getting there and the
             enjoying being there. Tati=s inventive use of sound is apparent in this
             opening as well, for the calls of the train conductor are mere electronic
             grunts, too difficult to hear to be called a language. Tati is showing
             here that there is no need for l...