Stop Making Sense

Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism

By Malcolm Turvey, Columbia University Press, $30

Jacques Tati: The Complete Works

Edited by Alison Castle, Taschen, $225

ORMIDABLE FORMALISTS ROBERT BRESSON, jean-pierre Melville, and Jacques Tati are the three musketeers of postwar, pre–Nouvelle Vague French cinema, although, paradoxically, it’s crowd-pleasing was a career derailer at once self-effacing and megalomaniacal.