A Film Canon

Fair Day plays like a gentle, loving parody of Keaton's signature gag, in which the world is both efficiently and beautifully reconfigured around his movement through it, and reduced to a homogeneous, violent flux to which he remains curiously oblivious, partly by virtue of his total identification with the (usually) mechanical purveyor of that movement. To this end, Tati doesn't elaborate a narrative so much as a topos - the preparation of a mildly chaotic, decentred, picaresque townscape for a travelling fair - and condenses it into a prolonged version of this gag, as local postman François (Tati) attempts to replace his chronic inability to cycle in a straight line with "postal route American style". Unlike Keaton, however, this trajectory is continually, comically disrupted, replacing sublimity with bathos, and oblivion with continuity, to the extent that François ultimately feels like a mere condensation of his environment, rather than an exception to it. This is clearest in those phenomena that either halt (a rogue bell pull, a complicated thresher), or slow (a river, freshly laid tar) his passage, most of which represent some variation on the postal responsibility that is the ultimate impediment, insofar as it implies a series of stases that can only be surmounted with the aid of a training program that proves beyond François, and finds most comic expression in a conjunction of bicycle and merry-go-round. Similarly, Tati manages to abstract and reify his trajectory to the extent that it frequently continues without his participation - most explicitly when, after being hitched to the back of a truck and throwing itself off, François' bike continues autonomously, forcing him into so many desperate attempts to re-identify himself with it, but most poetically in his inability to completely identify himself with a professional bicycle race, which, in turn, beautifully identifies that trajectory with the slipstream - a contingent, opportunistic, physical phenomenon, rather than the evidence of any particular grace, or protection - as if to clarify that, though "Americans are a law to themselves, the world won't turn any quicker."