Great Endings Series: Parade
This article is part of a regular feature spotlighting notable finales in film.
Tati as M. Hulot in Playtime
What writer, director and performer Jacques Tati did with Playtime (1968) was revolutionary. What he did with Parade (1974) was sublime.
The studios spent an unprecedented amount of money on Playtime building an entire small city (deemed “Tativille”) for Tati’s beloved Mr. Hulot character - the speechless, forward-leaning, befuddled chap perpetually stymied by his surroundings - to bumble around in. In the climactic supper club sequence, the stifling and isolating nature of the club’s inhuman layout and architecture confined bodies with its sharp angularity and compartmentalizing of personal space. It was gradually broken down by the guests, who did nothing short of enacting a small humanist revolt by reappropriating and liberating the space with bits of slapstick-tinged destruction that felt like a collectivist response to the oppression of industrialized modernity. A kind of spatial civil disobedience.
The spatial revolution at the nightclub in Playtime, which synonymises spatial freedom with pleasure and contentment
Though Playtime is now rightly regarded as a masterpiece - one of the towering achievements of cinema - it flopped at the box office, bankrupting and sinking Tati. Following the unsuccessful Trafic (1971), Tati had to work on a much smaller scale. With Tati’s unique talent for getting fruitful results from the act of objectively observing human behavior - often based on physicalizing his themes while utilizing little or no spoken dialogue - it’s no surprise that Parade, his last completed film, manages its own major achievements with so much less.
In dismantling or disregarding its own classification of boundaries and barriers within a live stage performance, Tati essentially does for the concepts of performance and spectatorship in Parade what he did for dehumanizing architecture in Playtime, developing his ideas about physical repression and liberation within the context of performance. The final scene in Parade is perhaps the most beautifully conceived sequence involving children you will ever see in a movie - a graceful coda in a work that deals with the discoveries and joys inherent in the act of Play.
Parade, which sweetens the expressionism of Tati’s fusions of sound and image, looks ostensibly like a typical project from the director - with a detachment from the action that signals an observation-based movie experience and little if any narrative. We think we’re simply seeing a Tati concert film, but it soon becomes clear that more is going on in the film than the performances of jugglers, tumblers, musicians, animal acts and periodic bits of highly effective pantomime by Tati himself.
Tati’s masterful bits of pantomime throughout the film are Play in its most mature form.
The front rows of the crowd appear to be made up mostly of vibrantly dressed hippies, one of whom improvises a pointy hat from an orange street cone on the way into the theater. These spectators look to be not too different from the painters and set builders producing props and readying craft materials off to the side of the stage during the show - in full view of the audience. There are bits of wacky business with guests and theater staff in the lobby at intermission, during which we also catch Tati backstage goofing with other performers. Black and white cardboard cutouts of people occupy a number of the seats, creating “fake audience members.”
What is happening here? The show is unfolding not only onstage, but also backstage, offstage, in the stands, in the lobby, in front of the theater and presumably everywhere else. The Act of Performance is ubiquitous, as Tati sees it. It’s all a form of Play - innumerable discoveries being made at the moment they transpire that automatically endow all moments, private and public, with a theatricality worthy of the equal attention from the camera. Play is happening all around us all the time.
Tati was said to have admired the fashion styles and aesthetics of the hippie movement.
Tati goes as far to illustrate that the business with the audience members - from a man in the stands extemporaneously performing magic tricks for other audience members during act breaks, to a man who takes numerous pratfalls trying to mount a donkey trotting around the stage (to the humiliation of his wife) - are also performing in their own way. And that their actions are to be equally privileged with the acts that are part of the show. This show (which is actually a cutting together of three different shows with different stage setups) is never formally hosted or emceed, not even by Tati.
Instead, the proceedings play out naturally and organically and this breaking down of the barrier between the activity both on stage and off, between performer and viewer, effectively democratizes the entertainment. Tati doesn’t take a hierarchical view of live performance, with the talent handing down sensations to the isolated spectator. Everyone in the house can command and is deserving of attention. Everyone can entertain. And all entertainment is worthy. The house lights are always up, and the sense of transparency, spontaneity and freedom kindled in this relationship evokes the utopian aspirations of some of the more idealistic elements of 60’s peace movements.
For a movie that keeps us guessing about to what degree constructed fiction and documentary happenstance are interloping upon each other from sequence to sequence, the form of Tati’s film exemplifies a similar sense of democracy (between fiction and nonfiction) to match the democracy of the action within the film. Ordinary people are as interesting and entertaining as those in the spotlight and we don’t know where spectacle ends and life begins (or vice versa), and neither does Tati’s production. This feeling never comes off as confusing, annoying or pompous. It’s liberating. We are the hero. Our lives are the show.
Then something radical and beautiful happens and the movie lifts off the ground.
After the show ends and the audience has left the theater, two tow-headed children sitting off to the side up front take the stage. The camera has been frequently cutting to their reactions throughout the show, occasionally catching their passive or even bored expressions. They wander over to where the crafts and props from the show were left behind and begin improvising their own Play as their parents watch from their seats. As Tati watches from upstage, the children begin to imitate what they’ve seen in the show. They are unsupervised and what they’re doing looks unrehearsed. Above all, it is improvised, as children (like professional improv performers who have to unlearn all the self-protective, self-centered impulses the grown up world conditions in us) have the ability to create amusement together - along with the appearance of Story - using only their imaginations and any inanimate objects within reach. It’s something to aspire to.
Why is this important? Perhaps what makes these simple and not terribly new ideas seem so fresh and profound may have something to do with their sharp contrast to how we’re living our lives at the moment. We don’t afford ourselves time and space for spontaneity. We do not purposely do things which have no point (something clinically and statistically shown to be identified with contentment in life in polls and scientific studies). We can’t stand to be without direction and stimulation. Phone screens and social media monopolize our attention, cutting off our capacity to discover the world, connect with others and feel present in our own lives. We don’t daydream. We shrink from the outside world and stay in and watch TV. We pass these habits and values on to our children and are baffled as to why they grow up to be socially inept, dependent, fragile, listless, frightened and depressed.
In his urgent book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari laments that the increased physical and psychological confinement of American children is directly related to the decreased opportunity children are given by parents and schools to develop a sense of unsupervised, spontaneous play. Childhood now happens at home, behind closed doors, under adult supervision. It’s rigidly scheduled (“play dates”) and often takes place behind screens. With no agency, no privacy or engagement with the world - often justified by media-instilled fear-mongering that creates overprotective parents - children act out, fail in school and develop psychological disorders. Their attention spans dwindle.
Depriving them of opportunities for spontaneous, unsupervised play deprives them of intrinsic motives, those things we do because they bring us pleasure or fulfillment rather than because we’re forced to, or to get something out of it at a later point. It should be an easy enough problem to acknowledge, let alone fix. But unfortunately, despite the fact that we actually live in an incredibly safe country, scared, illogically overprotective adults, conditioned with a nonstop diet of media histrionics, call child protective services on parents who let their middle school-aged kids so much as walk home alone from school.
All of this forms the latticework (or really it should be likened to a prison) which Tati’s film, even a half century later, threatens to ideologically dismantle. Parade’s pro-spontaneity, anti-hierarchical ideas would be deeply unfashionable in an efficiency-obsessed, hyper-competitive society which is set up to make citizens feel bad about themselves. A civilization in which there is so much detachment - from community, from the lives of other people, from reality and from engagement with one’s own curiosity. Incalculable amounts of wasted talent and squandered time, lived in someone else’s idea of validation and fulfillment.
This final moment with the children drives home the point of Tati’s challenging, intricate and yet affirming movie, whose agenda could be called subversive in the way that its radical openness and sincerity challenges the cynicism and over-deliberation present in our 21st century lives and reflected in the movies that are made today. The act of just watching the children play, watching them build their world, is fascinating - even to someone like me who’s never particularly cared for children. The anti-elitism of this project, carried over from Playtime, is Earth-shattering and yet it’s all articulated within this quaint little family-friendly stage show. Tati sunsets his career by presenting the ideas he spent his life filming and performing on stage in a graceful but powerful way. It’s like the keynote speakers in his final address are the two children. We’re never too old to learn Play from a Master, he seems to say, as he passes the torch off to a new generation of Players, who eagerly take the stage as pure subjects with no self-awareness.
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