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“An illusionist performs.
With slow and calculated gestures, he produces various objects: glasses of water, rabbits, Bengal fires, live doves, flags, hens, gloves, which he pulls from his coat or hat.
The performance concludes.
The illusionist acknowledges his audience, but only two or three polite and restrained claps rise from the hall.
The curtain falls like a guillotine.” *
A red poster, which as the days go by will first be placed in a corner, to make way for that of Billy Boy & The Britoons, and finally rolled up and taken away.
It's the late '50s, in an England that now prefers boy bands to magicians.
The rolled-up red poster reads:
TATISCHEFF.
Magie. Illusions.
Jacques Tatischeff surely had to be a magician. How else to explain the charm emanating from his stentorian figure?
An atlas flowed through his veins. He had inherited the surname from his grandfather, a certain Dmitrij Tatiščev, count, general, and diplomat of the Russian embassy in Paris. And then, a bit of Italian, Dutch, French. The first name, Jacques, was unmistakably French. “Jacques Tati”: sounded certainly more French this way. So concise, as a stage name, it seemed invented.
A handbook of gestures, a balanced awkwardness, was Jacques Tati. A candid and disenchanted eye, capable of laying bare every pettiness of the human being. A handful of feature films —in which Tati plays himself pretending to be Monsieur Hulot— bear witness to his carefree eternity. His gaze, increasingly bitter, his consistent self amidst a hopelessly protean world.
Years, decades, centuries later, he continues to tell us: look, man is always the same, in whatever life he is boxed.
And a life that Hulot would have staged to live—between Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967)—would have been that of the old vaudeville magician, had Tati's idea become film. Instead, that script was left there, merely outlined: laconic, the inscription Film Tati n° 4 sealing its abandonment.
Now that the gentle gestures of Tatischeff are no more, how to open the windows of that basement, to finally make the world see its wonder?
Another Tati will never exist, that's for sure.
The faint sketch, doodled by his hands, of that old discontent magician, seems confined in the dead archive of a piece of world extinguished, in Paris, in November 1982.
Instead, shortly before the death of Tati's daughter, director Sylvain Chomet thinks of including a snippet of Jour de fête, the first feature film of the young Tati, within his animated feature Les triplettes de Belleville. Chomet then contacts the daughter, Sophie Tatischeff. And she, having surely inherited something from her father, sees in animation the unexpected solution.
That red poster, with the austere face of Jacques Tati, can finally open a new film of Monsieur Hulot, this time returned as Tatischeff. The price, modest, to be honest, is having partially changed the expressive medium. The result is an animated film unlike any other.
The gentle touch of the past is intact. Softened, the sharp satire becomes a caricature of a world now gone. Life, as in every Tati film, is portrayed with very few gestures, making words superfluous.
The story, it seems, is that of Tati's relationship with his daughter, set in a fictional context: the illusionist takes with him a naive young girl, found by chance during one of his journeys.
“Every contract is a journey, at the mercy of trains and planes.
The life of a music hall artist is a continuous wandering, theaters are ports.” **
And it was precisely in a journey through rural Scotland, in the guise of a bored magician, that Tati thought he would rediscover his daughter.
What is certain is that we have found him.
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