At first I didn’t quite understand whether this movie was showing a genuine thing from France — men standing around, buying each others rounds of patisserie. But that’s the gag: These are alcohol-drenched baked goods, so they’re getting sloshed.

So that’s the joke. But… uhm… OK, it’s a thirteen minute short, but…

Hm:

It won the César Award For best short fiction film in 1978.

It was directed by Tati’s daughter.

Degustation maison. Sophie Tatischeff. 1978. ⚃

So… this is a bunch of skits collected as being an evening class — Tati is the teacher, of course, and shows off his skills at enacting various stuff, like “first time smoker” and stuff.

It rapidly becomes a rather flimsy conceit, as we’re taken to a tennis court (while the students are allegedly looking down from the building above).

So it’s just a series of scenes where Tati is being his goofy self, which is funny enough, I guess.

Here he’s demonstrating fishing.

He’d done some of these gags already in the short of the same name, and the following movie, but the facteurs gags are still hilarious.

But the rest is like… “Hey, Jacques! You’re a funny guy. You used to do vaudeville, right? Can you do 30 minutes of sight gags?” And then he did.

But we’re not talking roll-on-the-floor funny. More like amusing, and not always even that.

But when it’s funny, it’s funny.

Evening Class. Nicolas Ribowski. 1967. ⚃

What do you call this hairdo?

Ooh, nice counter.

Anyway, this is the final movie on this Rivette box set — some years after the previous movies.

This is very Rivette — these two people are on the heels of a mysterious mystery, running around gathering clues. And while the previous movies were more obviously scripted (at least in part), but I’m guessing they made things up here as they went along?

Unfortunately, neither Schneider nor Dallesandro are all that good at coming up with mysterious lines… they’re mostly talking English, and seemingly meaningful, random things sound better in French, right?

But it’s pretty riveting nonetheless.

:

We started work with the two actors, and after 8 days, things were going very badly.

[…]

We had a starting point of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves, this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other.

[…]

But since the relationship between Maria and Joe rapidly became hostile, we were forced to develop the story-line; from a mere pretext it took on a disproportionate importance. Maybe that gives the film a certain vagabond charm, I don’t know, but it really is a film with a first half-hour that’s quite coherent, and then it searches for itself three times.

Right, right.

I’m guessing the film was done in sequence, and you can see Schneider slowly checking out, doing less and less, while Dallesandro seems committed.

But… not actually that interesting?

OK, I’ve lost all interest in this. It’s just a random collection of scenes now, and there’s no mystery.

OK, now they’re just fucking with us.

The free jazz bits here are really quite good… and are the most interesting parts of the movie.

Well, OK, the first half hour of the movie is really good, but then it’s just… nonsense. I mean, I’ve watched Out 1 and I enjoyed it, but that had nerve and was interesting. This just seems like a random collection of scenes that nobody were committing to.

It’s just not good.

Merry-Go-Round. Jacques Rivette. 1980. ⚁