Jacque Tati's PlayTime

Playtime (1967) is the most ambitiously complex comedic film ever made. It is an epic, cinematic, and sui generis achievement that puts it in the same league as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Shaney’s Joe Versus the Volcano.

Jacque Tati (1907-1982) was a French comedic actor and filmmaker who achieved international stardom with his films, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday) and Mon Oncle (My Uncle), both starring his character Mr. Hulot, a good-natured and helpful man who clumsily fumbles through an increasingly impersonal world. Both films are cinematic classics (the last winning an Oscar for best foreign language film) that put him in the comparable league of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Yet, like both Chaplin and Keaton, Tati had artistic ambition that raised him above his contemporaries. He wished to articulate to cinema his own comedic conception of the modern world. With nearly ten years of planning and three of filming, Tati achieved his complete cinematic vision with the most immense complexity and with the most devastating consequences to his life.

Playtime is a film about how modern life - and modern architecture in particular - manipulates human behavior and our conceptions to the point of stale and rigid routine. Most importantly, it is about how the inevitable breakdown of modern life can lead to the reintroduction of people’s original, premodern freedom, exuberance, and playfulness. As one critic has asserted, Playtime is about how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line.

Shot on 70mm film for widescreen viewing, there are very few close-up shots. Instead, Tati invites the viewer to scan the screen and observe the everyday humors of modern life, often happening simultaneously at different spots. There are no real laugh-out-loud moments but hundreds of smiles. Similarly, there are no real main characters, but nearly a hundred minor characters each with their own story line that can be traced throughout the film, if just on the periphery and in incidental shots. Only the American tourist Barbara and Hulot himself could be identified as main characters. However, they are infrequent in their appearances. Indeed, Tati teasingly supplies the early parts of the film with numerous faux Hulots who pop up now and again on the periphery and are often misidentified as such by other characters.

Though ostensibly in color, the palette of the film is in whites, grays, and light blues, giving a near black-and-white texture to the film. Furthermore, almost all the humor comes as visual jokes, as if it were a silent film. But there are hundreds of these visual gags, often several happening at the same time, subtly at different points on the screen. Sometimes these jokes are building off previous jokes or only make sense if you have been following the story of a minor character throughout the film. As one critic noted, Playtime is a film to be seen not just multiple times but from multiple perspectives. I myself have seen the film numerous times over the past two decades, and I’ve always come away with a new gag from a new viewing. In this regard, its tone, style, and complexity approximate Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, Chaplain’s Modern Times, Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, Gilliam’s Brazil, and James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses.

The film is set into six sequences:

The Airport: An American tour group (including the woman, Barbara) arrives at the ultra-modern and impersonal Orly Airport. Many of the characters walk in rigid steps, along straight lines, turning at abrupt 90-degree angles, completely defined by the surrounding architecture that dictates their movements.

The Offices: M. Hulot arrives at one of the glass and steel buildings for an important meeting but gets lost in a maze of disguised rooms and offices, eventually stumbling into a trade exhibition of lookalike business office designs and furniture nearly identical to those in the rest of the building. Many of the buildings are made of glass walls which deprives the individual of privacy, but ironically separates him from others.

The Trade Exhibition: Old world Paris with its Eiffel Tower and flower shops have been abandoned and shrunk to reflections and periphery to make way for the modern world of consumerism. M. Hulot and the American tourists are introduced to the latest modern gadgets, including a door that slams "in golden silence" and a broom with headlights.

The Apartments: As night falls, M. Hulot meets an old friend who invites him to his sparsely furnished, ultra-modern and glass-fronted flat. This sequence is filmed entirely from the street, observing Hulot and other building residents through uncurtained floor-to-ceiling picture windows.

The Royal Garden: This sequence takes up almost the entire second half of the film. It is the most complex sequence in the film and a tour de force of visual gags - so much is going on at once, building upon each other, breaking down, climaxing in joyful destruction. At the opening night of a new restaurant, Hulot reunites with several characters he has periodically encountered during the day, along with a few new ones, including a nostalgic ballad singer and a boisterous American businessman. This is the turning point of the film in which the curve officially reasserts itself and the characters rediscover the liberty of abandoning the firm structures of modernity.

The Carousel of Cars: Hulot buys Barbara two small gifts as mementos of Paris before her departure. In the midst of a complex ballet of cars in a traffic circle portrayed as if an amusement park, the tourists' bus returns to the airport.

Though Playtime was a critical success, it was a massive and expensive commercial failure, eventually resulting in Tati's bankruptcy. Nevertheless, despite its resulting devastation, Tati produced one of the greatest comedic achievements in cinematic history. It was the quintessential expression of Tati’s genius as a filmmaker and, as he himself said, the exact film he had intended to make.