General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Trafic

Trafic is a 1971 comedy film directed by Jacques Tati, a French-Italian production in which his recurring character Monsieur Hulot, an auto company designer, escorts an experimental camper car from Paris to an auto show in Amsterdam while a series of breakdowns, traffic jams, and mishaps delay the journey.¹ It is the fourth and final feature in which Tati played Hulot, after Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Mon oncle, and Playtime.²

Key fact	Detail
Director, writer, star	Jacques Tati, who also plays Monsieur Hulot¹
Production	France and Italy, 1971; produced by Robert Dorfmann¹
Genre	Comedy, structured as a road movie³
French release	16 April 1971; released in Belgium, Sweden, Italy, the UK, and other countries through 1971 and later¹
Principal cast	Jacques Tati, Maria Kimberly, Marcel Fraval, Honoré Bostel, Tony Kneppers⁴
Music	Charles Dumont; cinematography by Edward van den Enden and Marcel Weiss³
Running time	Reported as 96, 97, 98, or 105 minutes by different catalogs¹^•³^•⁵

Spoilers

Story

At the firm Altra Motors, Hulot designs a camper car loaded with gadgetry: a mattress that inflates in the rear of the hatchback, a grille that doubles as a barbecue grill, and a horn that becomes an electric shaver at the flip of a dashboard switch.⁶ A lorry hauls the prototype toward the Amsterdam auto show, with Hulot following in his own car and Maria, a young public-relations executive, in her sports car with her designer clothes and her fluffy dog.¹

The trip supplies the film's structure. The lorry suffers a flat tire, runs out of gas, is searched at customs, is in an accident, and meets police, garages, and traffic jams, each a vignette of people and their cars.¹ Through contact with the drivers and mechanics they meet, Maria loses her imperious manner and becomes more relaxed.¹ The mishaps put the commercial success of the operation, and Hulot's arrival before the show opens, in doubt.³

Production

Tati wrote the screenplay with the artistic collaboration of Jacques Lagrange and the participation of the Dutch filmmaker Bert Haanstra, a Dutch documentary and feature director whose work Tati admired. Haanstra was initially responsible for three scenes but withdrew during the writing of the script; he remains credited in the titles as a close collaborator, under the misspelled name "Bert Naanstra".⁵^•³

The film was shot on location, and Tati continued his experimentation with image and sound in a genre then little exploited, the road movie.³ Dialogue is sparse, as is usual in Tati's films, with the soundtrack mixing French, Dutch, and English.⁵ Tati described the film's origin in observation: he spent two hours one Sunday morning on a small bridge over the autoroute de l'ouest watching Parisians drive out to the country, and did not see a single driver smile.³

The film followed Playtime (1967), Tati's 70 mm production, one of the most expensive French films made to that point, which had bankrupted him.⁷ Trafic was the smaller, faster project that kept his film career going.⁸

Themes and style

Tati took as his subject the explosion of automobile ownership among Western middle classes at the turn of the 1970s. In his treatment, the motorways become modern jungles in which people, shut inside their cars, behave like fairground animals.³ Like Jean-Luc Godard's Week-end (1967), the film observes daily life on the already congested roads of Western Europe.³

Much of the comedy is entropic: new-fangled devices malfunction in ways that would seem sadistic if the machines were people, and the film suggests that the fantasy of perfect automobility is just that, a fantasy, closing on a sea of closely parked, immovable cars.⁹ The Italian writer Alberto Moravia, an admirer of Tati, read the film differently, arguing that placed before the terrifying phenomenon of technology, Tati reveals himself as fundamentally optimistic and full of hope.²

Compared with Playtime, the film is more modest in scale and more grounded in tone, and some critics have found its narrative aimless; others regard it as a fitting terminus for Hulot.⁹^•⁶

Release and reception

The film opened in France on 16 April 1971 and reached Belgium, Sweden, Italy, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, West Germany, Finland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Poland, Iceland, and Hungary over the following years.¹ It was very little seen at release, playing on a single Paris screen on the Champs-Élysées, and it remains the least seen and least known of Tati's fiction features.²

Later assessments have been more favorable. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 96% Tomatometer score from 23 reviews, with critics describing it as an ingenious combination of comedy and social satire that was not a hit on release but has become a classic.¹⁰ Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, reviewed it in 1973 as a comedy in which everyone is incapable of dealing with the modern world, with Hulot handicapped by his good intentions.¹¹

A restoration of the film was carried out by Les Films de Mon Oncle, Eclair Group, and L.E. Diapason, and the Criterion Collection issued it on Blu-ray with a new 2K digital restoration.³^•⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1970s › Released 1970 to 1976

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?