Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday – Introduction

Possibly the most expensive joke in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, a film first released in 1953, was inspired by 1975’s Jaws.

I look into that, alongside Jacques Tati’s nostalgic condensing of human life into a French seaside town, in this introduction that I gave for the film in October 2025 at The Little Theatre in Bath. The film was shown in a double bill with The Straight Story, which it is said to have inspired, alongside being a key favourite film of David Lynch’s. This was as part of Picturehouse’s ‘Lynchspirations’ season which they held through the year after Lynch’s passing.

The audio in the video below was recorded specially based on the rough introduction that I had written before the screening.