Summer Time: Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

SteynonLine ^ | August 15, 2026 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

France is in the middle of the month of its deepest summer slumber. The juilletistes are back from their summer vacations but the aoûtiens are still enjoying theirs, and with them many of the businesses outside major cities and those who don't rely on tourists. Much of the country – and certainly everywhere near the water or the scenic hot spots – will appear to be running at half speed if at all, until La Rentrée kicks in at the beginning of September.

It's a tradition going all the way back to the Middle Ages, when Pope Gregory IX gave school children a month away from classes to help on their family farms. This was extended to six weeks by Napoleon, though mostly so that the children of the titled and the privileged had the leisure to establish a foothold in the social network that governed their lives. But it wasn't until 1936, when the left-wing Popular Front coalition gave workers two weeks' paid vacation in August, that the phenomenon of les grandes vacances began.

There are plenty of French films set during the doldrums of August, like Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1970), starring the incomparably photogenic Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, Patrice Leconte's resort holiday comedy Les Bronzés (1978, released in in English as French-Fried Vacation) and François Ozon's Summer of 87 (2020). Eric Rohmer made a specialty of setting films in the moral and emotional torpor of les vacances with Claire's Knee (1970), The Green Ray (1986) and A Summer's Tale (1996).

But the root and trunk of this little cine-genre took hold in 1953, with Jacques Tati's slight but irresistibly evocative Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

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TOPICS: History; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: movies

[Seruzawa]

I actually have a copy of Hulot’s Holiday off of TCM. Extremely boring. Dreadfully so.

[Stosh]

Essentially remade by Rowan Atkinson as “Mr. Bean’s Holiday”.

[PUGACHEV]

There was even a prior remake in 1962 starring Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation.