Prix Louis Delluc, Paris, 1953.
Prix de la critique internationale au Festival de Cannes, 1953.
Prix Femina, 1953.
Prix du festival de Berlin, 1953.
Nomination to the Award Academy for "best story" and "best scenario", Hollywood, 1956.
and others distinctions in Algeria, Sweden, Cuba...
5 years after the shooting of Jour de Fête, François the postman has disappeared and Hulot is born. A name, that of a neighbor of the rue de Penthièvres. A gait, that of Lalouette (a friend of the 16ème Dragons).
The team of Jour de Fête is here again, but this time, Tati imagined the scenario before he chose the place. Once more, the action takes place in a single place between the arrival and the departure of travelers, the vacationers.
St-Marc-sur-Mer is a small sea resort, which was partially destroyed during the World War 2. Jacques Lagrange designs all the frontages and gives a new entry to the Hôtel de la Plage.
The Hôtel de la Plage is still open during the shooting, so the vacationers have to face the happy team of Tati and his outbursts. The summer visitors are sometimes transformed into actors and sometimes evicted from the shooting scene.
There is no plot in Les Vacances de M. Hulot, or more precisely 1000 plots. The movie develops as the spectator watches.
The walker of the Hôtel de la Plage is bare-footed and looks in the small puddles. "Oh, a shell!" she cries, giving it to her husband. He takes it, looks at it and throws it away behind him. "Oh, another one! Get it, it is splendid!" And he throws it again like all the previous ones. We can hear a tragic "floc". It is funny, it is sad, it has been lived. Nevertheless it is short and Tati is already at the next sequence.
The story of Les Vacances de M. Hulot is his impossible integration, at the beach, at tennis, and at the restaurant. The whole movie is like the last sequence in which only the children, the English woman and the husband of the walker say goodbye to him, while the others avoid Hulot...
Name: Hulot
Firstname: no
Family: perhaps
Job: unknown
Address: unknown
Particular signs: silence, a strange gait that always takes him somewhere else.
Does the spectator love Hulot ? This is not the question, he is Hulot.