Le Midi, je t'aime

The Man in the Hat (2020) relates its hero’s travels through the Midi’s picturesque summer landscapes to light touchstones to memory. With poignant and comic vignettes in mime and an amazing soundtrack, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure.

The story at first feels as though a recurring dream in which The Man (Ciarán Hinds) drives a Fiat 500 on the narrow roads of rural southeastern France; on the seat next to him is the framed black-and-white photo of a young woman. The audience experiences the foreign life around The Man with his visitor’s reserve. His encounters are mostly in mime, like French classic Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. As The Man makes his way, he draws out people’s best qualities and brings strangers together. Released in the UK in September 2020 and in the US last May, this unusual and entertaining sleeper deserves to be seen.

Camargue dogs (Richard Henry, Conor Levitt, James Lailey, Sylvain Thirolle, and Mike Pickering) in The Man in the Hat (2020)

The story gets off to a quick start when The Man flees Marseilles pursued by five bald reservoir dogs in an orange and blue Citroën Dyane. The men dumped a body-sized object in the harbor and then realized that The Man, dining at an outside café, had seen them. The Man and the audience recall an earlier tabloid headline “Meurtre parmi les Mafieux à Marseilles” (Murder Among the Marseilles Mafiosi). A woman in a roadside café (Claire Tran) later fans his fears when he overhears her stage-whisper to a friend (Laurie Ravaux) an oh-my-god! story that involves her husband and the Mafia and ends “Pouf! Disparu!” The Man continues his sentimental journey mindful only to keep out of the gang’s sight.

A café patron (Claire Tran) tells a friend (Laurie Ravaux) an oh-my-god! story that ends “Pouf! Disparu!” in The Man in the Hat (2020)

The Man at first experiences the narrative in images and music much as the audience does; the few spoken words throughout the film are incidental and in French (with subtitles). The Man may be a foreigner, though not necessarily so. The story pivots rather than plots; its episodes feature a cast whose performances are as rich and surprising as the film’s music.

An attractive middle-aged local, The Woman (Sasha Hails), rides a bicycle in and out of episodes. An eccentric who resembles Fedor Dostoevsky and whom the credits identify as The Damp Man (Stephen Dillane), appears at first depressed and alone and later much improved with a vivacious partner, The Chef (Muna Otaru), and a champion chicken. A pair of gay farmers (Sam Cox and Didier Bourguignon) are masters of pantomime, and a pair of “Measurers” (Amit Shah and Zoé Bruneau) uniformed as local government or utility employees keep turning up compulsively measuring roads and public spaces but more specifically each other. A uniformed Official (Xavier Laurent) appears when needed to validate “documents”.

Other characters appear in vignettes: The Hotel Manager (Brigitte Roüan), The Biker (Maïwenn), The Older Man (Joseph Marcell) and The Older Woman (Sheila Reid), a priest (Jeremy Herrin), moving nuns, a group of cyclists, actors staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and not least the five men in the Dyane (a car last produced in France in 1983).

But good music is the lifeblood of this film. Musicians turn up along the route, from a zydeco duo on small local ferry, to the tenor Mark Padmore breaking into song (“Venezia”) at an auberge dinner table accompanied by a classical guitarist (Dario Rossetti Bonell), to the singer Matilda Homer and two others in The Man’s Fiat singing “Memory” which Homer wrote for the movie, to women garage mechanics singing of lost cars and lost cigarettes, to The Nadine Lee Band performing Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in a village square, to a klezmer band at a village festival.

Two lovely aural details are a recurring theme reminiscent of those Nino Rota wrote for Federico Fellini (though Alain Romans’s “Quel temps fait-il à Paris?” used by Tati may come nearer the mark), and a warm jazz saxophone like Cannonball Adderley’s on several numbers, including “The Pizza Van” in a scene in which The Man orders a pizza from a food van and The Damp Man and The Chef dance while making it.

The Official “validates” The Man’s journey which the latter summarized on the back of the woman’s photo with the opening lines of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au Voyage” (the poem’s refrain is quoted in our opening):

“Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!”

(My child, my sister,
Muse on the sweetness
Of living together there!)

The Man in the Hat 2020 U.K. (95 minutes) Open Palm Films/Rather Good Films/Gravitas Ventures. Directed and written by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck; music by Warbeck; casting by Nanw Rowlands; cinematography by Kanamé Onoyama; editing by Peter Boyle; produced by Daniel-Konrad Cooper and Dominic Dromgoole.