PlayTime (1967)

Whole tracts in which M. Hulot doesn't appear. Not as inspired as other Tati films. Main achievement is in precision and coordination of set-ups. Long takes are remarkably staged. Continuity of restaurant tableau is amazing. I would love to like this more, especially as whole enterprise bankrupted Tati. But by this stage Tati had been working with this genre and theme for 20 years so maybe he had said all he had to say. Amazingly, wardrobe, makeup, colours, etc. have not obviously aged except for odd hairstyle. Very classical look.

Tati's Playtime hardly encourages a deep sense of people as individuals - few of its dozens of characters are even granted a medium shot, let alone a close-up. The movie seems to warn of nothing less than collective obliteration - submersion into mass standardization, into absurd consumerism, into systems and surfaces that can only be stained by human intervention (and of course this is even before the online/social media revolution), into hopeless distance from basic pleasures (embodied by the American visitors to Paris who are kept well away from all its points of differentiation). Looked at a certain way, it can feel overwhelming, and even depressing - Tati's choreography is so staggering, often involving multiple bits of foreground and background action in the same shot, that it hardly seems designed for a human spectator. Of course, this is also at the heart of the film's inexhaustible glory, of its status as one of the most singular of all cinematic masterpieces. And Tati seeds his design with remnants of past humanity or portents of a future one - the sudden appearance of old friends, of mysterious near-doubles, of things that are just funny despite everything. The brilliant extended climax in a restaurant that all but gets destroyed on its opening night speaks to the capacity of collective action for transcending stifling corporate calculation. But it's also plainly a one-off, incapable of shaping the following day for more than a few dreamy early-morning hours. In one of its final gags, the movie posits that a moving window might actually influence the object that's being reflected in it - something that might have seemed like the ultimate loss of control, except that Tati presents it as an elating moment, a promise that all isn't yet heavy and tethered. Least of all, of course, M. Hulot, who returns to the crowd as modestly and mysteriously as he emerged from it.

Playtime is an intricately craft and incredibly directed comedy, with hundreds of moving parts in each scene resulting in an abundance of visual gags, often assisted by well timed sound effects. The camera keeps all the characters visible, and the deep focus ensures that we can see all of it at all times. The camera is expertly placed to frame the action in the exact way that is needed to produce the visual gags. Tati also manipulates the audio track, turning down the dialogue and turning up the effects. This guides the audience's attention to ensure that their focus is always where it needs to be in the very busy frame. However, though the film executes the gags perfectly (and should definitely be studied for how to fully utilize the medium for the sake of comedy), the gags are themselves not excessively funny. In some films this would not be the biggest issue, however, Playtime is a film built around these gags. Rarely presenting jokes in dialogue, and having the barest thread of a plot, Playtime has only its gags and its themes about modern life. The negative view of modern life and technology, arguing that they have taken the individuality out of the world, is one which has been presented in hundreds of other works, and is not enough to carry the film. Have nothing more than a banal theme and its plethora of flat (although admittedly well executed) gags, Playtime is an excellent film to study for its formal techniques, but nothing more.

Haven't done any homework when I was stumbling across my first Tati's film, and never imagined a film could be made in this way, a legitimate horizon-widener of film-making. The film commences in its befuddling narrative-void montages of variegated characters in the Paris airport of the vintage time, later, follows a group of American housewives-tourists embarks on their city route, first stop is a futuristic modern edifice of an Expo-esque site for a visit, while incorporating Monsieur Hulot (Tati himself), a well-mannered old man who keeps bypassing the man whom he supposedly should meet. After a short stopover at his upstart friend's newly- purchased home, Monsieur Hulot fortuitously bumps into the guy he had been looking for all day during a rubberneckers' gathering. The subsequent location resides in a nearly-furbished restaurant with a melange of patrons and staff (Monsieur Hulot and the American tourists included), the 45-minutes main course of all-inclusive gags, bloopers, transforms a hoity-toity eating place to a chaotic shindig, a sensible mockery and revelry of the vagaries of our humdrum activities. The film finishes with the tourists' return to the airport in the dusk light, and Monsieur Hulot's goodbye keepsake to one of the elegant American lady (Dennek), a silk kerchief, bespeaks the epitome of the metropolitan city. Basically, the film flouts any narrative-driven urges to underpin a normal feature film, the first half, viewers are being induced of an impression amounts to a loitering in a museum, with gigantic visual installations, emancipate a post-modern surrealism through the architectures, interior designs and costumes. The mirror-reflection antics have been ingeniously imposed many times to highlight several landmarks of Paris, the interlude of a transparent home design with minimalistic accessories is still avant-garde 45 years after. The restaurant bulk is more lively (both visually and aurally), a masterly farce encompasses minute boo-boos with miscellaneous players, every and each is done with a light touch but effectively strikes a chord with its resourceful wits and humor, and for certain, multiple watching is a must to extensively sense the virtuosity of all the arrangements, slap sticks and the esprit de corps, it is also the dramatic personae's playtime, in spite of that each and every one is bit part, counting Monsieur Hulot.Near the end, Tati culminates his love letter to Paris with a carousel-alike orchestration of vehicles lumbering around a circular parterre, an innovative amusement park metaphor renders immense pleasure through Tati's mojo.The film cost Tati 10 years in debt due to its commercial failure, with only 5 films made through his time, sadly it is a genius filmmaker and comedian who is way ahead of his time and should have been appreciated more. PLAYTIME is a marvelous feat, I cannot say if it is the case of Tati's other oeuvre since I'm plain a beginner in the territory, and it shines immaculately in the BluRay disc, I wonder it would be a perfect option to be enjoyed even you just leave it play in the background, each time you glance it, you will discover little gems there, profoundly witty or optically stimulating.