So you might remember director Jacques Tati from such movies as Playtime, which was a kind of highly-stylized comedy of motion and sound, which I described as “gently amusing, oddly beautiful, archly ironic, nearly balletic in its choreography.”

Well, so that was a movie featuring his M. Hulot character, and this is the very first of those, from 14 years earlier. The good news is that over 14 years, Tati got way better at making movies. The bad news is that this one is really kinda meh.

It fails to reach that transcendent strangeness that Playtime inhabits, and so it ends up just feeling like a kind of high-class, French Marx Brothers minus the terrible bits where Groucho talks. Like, “oops, all Harpo” except less mean-spirited and hateful.

It’s inoffensive. It’s fine. And because it’s about a holiday resort in 1950s France, it’s weirdly fascinating just for the window into this time and place. (Which, btw, the lack of cultural context means that it’s hard to understand the joke sometimes. Like, there was one scene where the fact that a dude was dressed funny was important, but I only understood this late because of other characters’ reactions — to a modern eye, they’re all dressed in completely absurd ways, and whatever semiotics might have attached to this or that outfit are lost.)

Not really recommended, but if it comes onscreen and you watch it, you won’t hate it.