So what are the best movies about cars? That question/call to debate inevitably conjures forth a usual list of suspects. There’s Bullitt with its roaring V8s; The French Connection with its iconic chase through the Windy City; the silent nihilism of Vanishing Point; Two-Lane Blacktop with its existential asphalt; the neon-drenched tire smoke of the Fast & Furious franchise. Prefer your drama on the track? There’s Grand Prix, Winning, Le Mans in the classic category, Ford v Ferrari and F1 most recently.
But if you want to watch a film that truly captures the profound, absurd and deeply neurotic relationship between humanity and the automobile, you need to park the muscle cars. You need to watch Jacques Tati’s 1971 masterpiece, Trafic.
Trafic was the final film featuring French director Tati’s iconic alter-ego, Monsieur Hulot — a lanky, silent-era-style bumbling everyman clad in a trench coat, trilby and a perpetually unlit pipe. In this outing, Hulot is employed as the principal designer for Altra, a boutique French car manufacturer.
The thin plot follows a desperate logistical quest: Hulot and a ragtag crew must transport their revolutionary new prototype from Paris to the international motor show in Amsterdam.
Will they make it in time for the show? Will they make it at all? It won’t be easy, of course. If it was there wouldn’t be a movie. So time for the audience to do up the seatbelt (or not, it was optional in those days) and accompany our man on a slow-motion road trip odyssey that transforms the modern highway into a theater of the absurd.
The camper van as Swiss Army knife
Across his films, especially his later ones, Tati came back time and time again to an obsession with 60s-style technological progress, and the ways us humans responded to it. In Trafic, sitting at the literal and thematic centre of the film, is the vessel that will carry us on our epic journey from Paris to Amsterdam, the Altra prototype.
Built on the bones of a modest Renault 4, it is the ultimate expression of mid-century automotive optimism — and a biting satire of consumer culture’s obsession with unnecessary features. Its smorgasbord of gadgets is that era’s version of the overloaded multimedia systems we like to marvel at/complain about today.
This camper van is designed not just for travel, but for total domestic encapsulation. Tati’s genius manifests in a sequence where Hulot demonstrates the vehicle’s absurd, Swiss Army-knife gadgets to a bewildered bystander. The front grille folds down to become a fully operational charcoal barbecue. The horn button doubles as an electric shaver outlet. The headlights rotate outward to serve as bedside reading lamps. A small kitchen sink, a pop-up tent extension and hidden compartments reveal themselves with the gentle click of a latch.
It is a monument to modern convenience that is utterly, hysterically inconvenient to actually use. Tati saw right through the automotive marketing machine, predicting our modern obsession with dashboard screens and over-engineered luxury decades before the first infotainment system was ever conceived.
The highway as a living organism
In Trafic, traffic isn’t just a mere logistical nuisance; it’s a bizarre, collective human ritual. Cars are extensions of their owners. In one of the film's most celebrated observational sequences, Tati positions his camera at a standstill intersection, watching drivers through their windshields. Left to their own devices in their private metal bubbles, they pick their noses, scratch their faces, yawn in terrifying unison and argue with invisible passengers.
The automobile, Tati suggests, promises us freedom but also traps us in isolation cells. Sounds a bit like the internet.
The journey to Amsterdam is plagued by an escalating comedy of errors. A border customs checkpoint treats the prototype like an alien artifact; A flat tire sends wheels rolling into canals; a devastating lack of gasoline causes yet another delay, during which, at one point, tucked into the back corner of the frame in a dusty backroads gas station, a B&W TV broadcasts the first moon landing.
Through it all, the tone is never angry. Tati looks at our car-choked civilization not with malice, but with a gentle, melancholic empathy.
And so Tati and his hapless acolytes wind their way languidly through some mild adventures through to the film’s most famous sequence, a surreal, slow-motion multi-car pileup. In the hands of any other director, a massive highway accident is a moment of violence and terror. In Trafic, it is a ballet, and a truly weird sequence.
Once the pileup is set in motion, vehicles glide across the grass, pirouette through the air and crumple into one another with a gentle, almost rhythmic grace. When the dust settles, no one involved erupts in road rage. Instead, vehicle occupants emerge from the wreckage dazed and strangely liberated, stretching their limbs in the afternoon sun and examining the damage with polite, philosophical curiosity. One even begins performing impromptu calisthenics on the grass. Tati strips the machines of their kinetic violence, and in doing so, with a gentle nudge of the elbow, asks us why we’re always in such a hurry.
A masterclass in visual comedy
Tati isn’t for everyone. There’s little-to-no dialogue, things move along slowly, the tone is more whimsical than laugh-out-loud funny. But like all of Tati’s work, Trafic is an auditory and visual feast. It does require your full attention. Without much dialogue, the movie communicates through a brilliantly engineered soundscape of squeaking windshield wipers, coughing engines and crunching metal.
Throughout the film, Tati cuts to scenes of the Amsterdam Auto Show, both in preparation and with the show actually underway, the kiosk meant to feature the Altra, looking like an proto-Subaru stand, sitting forlornly empty. It’s a visual treat for those interested in auto shows of the day.
When the Altra team finally arrives in Amsterdam, the car show has already ended. The exhibition hall is empty. The destination was a bust, but the journey was unforgettable.