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Jacques Tati's TraficIt just might make you love your car again.

By Nathan HellerPosted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, at 7:14 AM ET

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The collision is Trafic's turning point. The stagy, baroque sound effects from the rest of the movie drop out; we hear birds as the motorists stumble from their cars like animals out of hibernation. Tati seems to be plugging the idea of a big, broad world beyond the dashboard—and yet it's automobiles that have brought these people together in a new landscape. The first half of the film was quick to recognize cars as enablers of bad behavior. Here, they have enabled just the opposite.

For instance, strangers start helping each other. Hulot returns home with an injured old man; his fellow travelers take shelter with an American bodywork mechanic living nearby, a sort of Brando manqué. Even the hard-driven PR agent loosens up, as evidenced by her change from leather and heels to washed-out jeans, the international symbol for laid-back-ness. She spends a tender evening tooling around the area in her convertible. By the time they all get back en route to Amsterdam, her car growling playfully along the river, their journey has become a different kind of road trip, and Trafic has reintroduced a different kind of car experience:

Of course, auto culture has not changed to suit these revivified travelers. They still get caught in traffic as they merge with the Amsterdam highways. They watch near-fistfights break out over rear collisions. They miss the show that was their journey's object.

But their perception of the road has changed, and Tati takes pains to show us how. He backs the highway scenes with rock 'n' roll, focusing in on the cars' gleaming fenders and spinning hubcaps. It's fun, sexy, and tinged with Americana. (The movie's title itself is a nod across the pond, circulation being the proper French word for road traffic.) Cars have become a reprieve from the daily grind rather than one of its chief burdens: The PR agent shrugs off her company's failure at the auto show and prances after Hulot, into the crowded street. He spurns the train to stay with her, and as the movie ends, the two of them head arm-in-arm into the parking lot, where, we're meant to think, they wander rapturously among the cars and find romance (or something).

Charming, right? But if the road is still deadlocked and nasty, what, really, have these slap-happys accomplished? The answer, for Tati, came down to a quixotic idea about cinematic realism: If the screen world resembled the real world enough, he thought, viewers would cease to find a boundary between them. Changes in perception that the movie characters accomplished—like overcoming car malaise—could bleed seamlessly back into the world outside.

The result is that Trafic is neither a condemnation of car culture, a la Week-End, nor a solution to its trials. Instead, it tried to show moviegoers how to enjoy themselves in an irremediable situation. This upbeat resignation may have been partly a holdover from Tati's early life: He was a child during the food rations of World War I and spent part of his adulthood hiding from the German occupation. But it's the automobile lust of the '50s he was reaching for amid the grim traffic of the disco era—the idea that seeing cars as objects of excitement, romance, and adventure would let us live more humanly among them. How useful is that lesson? A blanket of auto pollution hangs around our planet. Gas is more than $4.50 a gallon. Zealous car use seems the last thing that the world needs now. A fresh vision of the road, though, never looked so good.