Parade DVD

Tati's final film is his first new DVD release in over 4 years. Graeme Hobbs takes a ringside seat.

‘What you are going to see is not a film; it is a spectacle whose aim is to break the ice between the screen and the audience’ said Tati of his circus-set final feature, ‘in my show, nobody knows who the juggler is, the painter, the spectator, the artist; who is the clown and who isn’t’.

Indeed, Parade – Tati’s final feature – is shot through with his comic enterprise to ‘democratise the gag’. It’s a carnival of jugglers, yodellers, duff tricks and early 70s fashion, playing children, cossack dancers, an oompah band and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual jokes. As the audience enters, a decorator backstage paints a flower in a lion's mouth, and Tati cuts to the same flower on a woman's dress. Later, a props man puts a ‘professional’ magician to shame, with their own duel disrupted by a member of the audience who turns a few neat tricks of his own. To the consternation of his wife, a suited man jumps out of the audience to ride a bucking mule, while a toddler with red and white stripy tights enters a door to applause from inside. Tati is then shown wearing the same colour socks as he performs his impressions sportives – the mime acts with which he began his career. If you are new to Tati, Parade is not the place to start, but if his comic world is familiar, then this knowledge will enrich the film, and also make it more poignant.

The title of Tati's unrealised satire about television – Confusion – is an accurate description of the background to Parade. Made for Swedish TV to repay the debt Tati owed them after they had enabled the completion of Trafic, it was filmed – partly framed for 1.33:1, partly for 1.66:1 – on video, 16mm and 35mm, in Stockholm in 1971, 1973, (also in Paris that year), and again in 1974, by which time the child actors had aged noticeably. It’s a wonder Tati came up with anything at all cohesive by the end of this, let alone something so celebratory. At the end, he simply hands the ring over to two young children who are left to play with the props, while atop the circus building, a prancing horse, similar to that which trundled in on the merry-go-round 25 years earlier in Jour de Fête, holds our gaze.

Graeme Hobbs on 29th May 2009
Author of 276 reviews