Summary
On a farm in rural France, a sports coach is training two boxers for a forthcoming match
when disaster strikes. One of his boxers is knocked out during a training bout and,
to continue training the coach needs to find a replacement - fast. He notices a
young farmhand, an obvious boxing enthusiast, miming a boxing match by himself in a barn,
and persuades him to enter the makeshift boxing ring. With only his enthusiasm and
a teach-yourself book to help him, the farmhand throws everything he has into the phoney
boxing match. With a little help from the village postman and his cronies, our hero
pulls off a spectacular victory, only to land an unexpected blow from his mother...
Review
This early film, written and starring France’s master of comedy, Jacques Tati, was directed
by René Clément, a man who is not often associated with slapstick comedy.
Years before he became a household name in France for his comic film creations, François
the postman and Monsieur Hurlot, Tati was a popular comic performer on stage. This
film features one of his most successful pre-WWII stage routines, that of the boxing fanatic
taking on an imaginary (invisible?) opponent.
Whilst not quite vintage Tati material, Soigne ton gauche features some side-splitting
sequences which makes it a hugely entertaining and memorable short film. You wonder
why Tati took so long to make a name for himself in cinema, when, on the basis of his
performance in this film, he clearly has at least nine-tenths of the talent of those other
great film slapstick comedians, Charlie Chaplin and Buston Keaton. The film’s closing
scene, with the comic country postman cycling off into the distance, seems to presage
Tati’s first notable work as a director, L’École
des facteurs, made a decade later.
© James Travers 2002
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