Gai dimanche is the second of Tati’s screen performances to survive on celluloid, and this particular three-reel film was written with Enrico Sprocani, a circus clown known affectionately as Rhum. The pair’s own down-at-the-heels experiences inspired the story.
Tati and Rhum play tramps who come up with the idea of hiring a dilapidated old car to ferry tourists around the countryside. A series of visual gags offer an early insight into the themes and methods Tati would develop to perfection years later.

Neil McGlone

Tati’s first famous film, Gai dimanche, is dated 1935. Tati plays a down-and-out dandy, slightly tramp-like but dressed with a kind of elegance, who at the start of the lm is pushed out from the entrance to the underground station where he spent the night. He lets him- self be dragged to a picnic by his peddler friend, and the two of them rent a rickety convertible for an outing and pick up a series of eccentric people. The first faint outline of the airhead character is already outlined: he is powerless to control his destiny, lazily pushed by the wind, like one way arrow road sign that has since been blown about by the wind.

Claude Beylie, Jacques Tati inconnu…, “Cinéma”, n. 23, December 1957