What a waste of my time!!!

Admirable film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

The films of Pierre Etaix are pretty much unknown today, having been tied up in a legal dispute for decades. It was finally resolved in 2007, and they've been restored and reintroduced within the last few years (Criterion's nice box set was released in 2013). Yoyo is perhaps the best regarded of them. It is a fine French comedy. Somewhat reminiscent of Tati, but it has its own charms. Etaix stars. At first he plays a lonely rich man in 1925 (it opens as a silent film), who uses his extravagant wealth to distract himself from missing his true love (Claudine Auger), a circus performer. She returns with his clown son, Yoyo, in tow. After the stock market crash, Etaix joins his girl and their son in the circus act. The film soon skips ahead to WWII, where Yoyo, now an adult clown (also played by Etaix) entertains troops and hopes for better times. The plot on this one is very loose, and the comedy's not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it is very amusing and entertaining throughout. It's also quite lovely at times. It seems that this Etaix person is an actual discovery.

This movie was on TCM the other evening and I am glad I caught it. Host Robert Osborne explained that it was tied up in litigation for many years and has had little TV or theater exposure. Coincidentally, it was at the Film Forum in NYC in April, along with 3 other films of director/star/writer Pierre Etaix.As mentioned in my title, he borrows heavily from both Tati and Chaplin, and it is a very successful blend of both. He has lots of clever sight gags of the kind Tati sprinkled liberally throughout his films, as well as the prolonged kind of skit favored by Chaplin. But whereas Tati's characters are primarily two-dimensional, Chaplin's are often fleshed out with heart, and the humor contained sometimes comes with a tinge of pathos. Etaix combines the best elements of both masters and the result is a very thoughtful brand of comedy which draws the viewer in like a vortex.I only recorded this one, but I wish I had recorded the others. His is a unique type of humor which comes with an emotional ingredient I had not seen before in film comedy. It is presented as a mini-saga, for lack of a better term, of a boy who grows to manhood trying to earn enough to restore his father's château. His mother, a circus acrobat, had become estranged from his father years earlier and retained custody of the boy. More than 40 years elapse during the film and Etaix plays both the father and, later, the boy grown up.A reviewer above mentioned that Etaix displayed genius. I would like to see more proof but the reviewer is on the right track. "Yoyo" is a special film from a gifted filmmaker which will touch your heart as comedy rarely does.

While Tati seemed to love performers this film abuses them, its seriously unfunny. The actors are fine but they are treated shoddily. The film maker seems to want to denigrate live performers. It's inventiveness is not enough salvage it's integrity.. Check out any Tati movie and compare the framing the narrative and the characterization to appreciate how trite this film is by comparison. Oddly it was made AFTER Tati's heyday. One would hope something had been learned. French satire by its very nature is somewhat lame, but this is embarrassing. It's as though Germany had won in 1871 and infected European story telling.

I remember in 1965 seeing a clip of this movie on TV the week it came out. It featured a rich woman being driven slowly round the square by her chauffeur and 'walking' her dog by sitting in the back of the limousine with her dog on a lead to the pavement. That quirky and humorous image stuck in my impressionable young head and I promised myself I would go and see it when it came to the local cinema. Needless to say, it never did and it has never been on TV or DVD that I'm aware of.I'm still waiting...This is so often the case in the UK. I am a huge fan of Japanese cinema but most of the movies reviewed highly on sites like Midnight Eye never get over here. Are subtitles so unbearable to UK moviegoers? We lap up some of the tripe from Hollywood but anything where English is not the main language really struggles. One thing is for sure, most of the challenging and original stuff is not coming from Los Angeles.