Critics reviews

Traffic, though more conventional as a narrative than Playtime, has considerable virtues... Though the ostensible subject is once again technology and its failures, the film really deals with synchronicity and asynchronicity: Pumping a tire on the side of the road, Hulot bends his body with each stroke so that his butt regularly juts into traffic, and gaps between cars materialize exactly as needed.

Trafic is generally held to be one of Tati's minor films, and he himself saw it as a step back after the accomplished vision of Playtime. It's certainly true that Trafic is not consistently funny, its humor drawn out or diffuse to the point of near abstraction. Its real comedy lies less in jokes than in the accumulation of polyphony and simultaneous incident, and in the offhand touches that serve as punctuation.

Trafic doesn't seem to suffer from pandering or artistic compromise; its meticulously framed images are stuffed with the recognizably choreographed chaos, entropic mayhem and long-lens potshots at humanity fumbling with mechanization that are its ringmaster's signature. If Playtime's enormous scope was visionary, here Tati's tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.

Given the size of his achievement, it's astonishing that Jacques Tati made only half a dozen features, none of them bad. But if I had to single out any of these as a lesser work, I'd pick Trafic (1971), the only one that qualifies as compromised... Trafic represented a conscious step backward for Tati. Because, as the opening credits plainly state, the film stars "Mr. Hulot," this was already contrary to the direction he wanted to move in.