Pierre Etaix

Pierre Etaix may not be well known in America, but during the 1960s this French cabaret-clown-turned-film-director was one of cinema's great comic masters. Etaix's relatively small body of work—he made five features and three comedy shorts between 1961 and 1971—was out of circulation for nearly four decades, but happily restored in 2010, and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray in this excellent set from Criterion. Etaix won an Oscar for his short film Happy Anniversary (1962), about a couple whose celebratory plans are stymied by, among other things, Paris traffic. And he should have won for his debut short, Rupture (1961), a brilliant one-man piece in which Etaix's world quite literally comes apart around him. His masterpiece is Yoyo (1965), an almost soundless feature-length comedy that begins with an evocation of the silent era and ends with a playful jab at 1960s TV culture. But all of his films are marvelous, drawing from a tradition spanning from the early work of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton up through to France's Jacques Tati, under whom Etaix apprenticed as a writer and an artist. In his first feature, The Suitor (1963), Etaix takes on a variation of the classic Keaton character, playing a hopelessly naïve rich man trying to woo a woman. The set is completed by As Long as You've Got Your Health (1966), a quartet of short pieces with a savage (and consistently hilarious) satiric view of modern life; the bittersweet romantic comedy Le Grand Amour (1969); the comedy short Feeling Good (1966); and the documentary Land of Milk and Honey (1971). Extras include new video introductions by Etaix, a documentary on the filmmaker, and a booklet featuring an essay by critic David Cairns. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)