PLAYTIME Movie Review

Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) tries in vain—but with remarkable tenacity—to keep an appointment in a forbidding modern landscape of glass and steel. The third film in Jacques Tati's trilogy about Hulot's struggle with modernization (after Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle) was an extraordinarily ambitious and costly production, featuring huge and elaborate sets. Many of the film's most intricate sight gags depended on the sheer scale of the settings, such as an overhead shot of a linked maze of glass-enclosed office cubicles, or a gigantic nightclub set. Tati's concept was for a movie as massive as its gags, and so it was prepared as a 70mm, five-track stereo super-production with a three-hour running time. In many of the film's most audacious sequences, comic bits are happening simultaneously in different parts of the frame; in order to even see them clearly, let alone respond to their comic rhythm, the screen image needs to be very large and razor sharp—hence the wide film gauge Tati selected. Alas, Playtime was not only cut by more than an hour by the time it reached the U.S. (six years after its completion), but it was never available here in its 70mm version. The fuzzier and smaller 35mm prints circulated here were vastly less detailed than Tati's original film, rendering much of Playtime’s most brilliantly choreographed comedy nearly unintelligible. Even seen under ideal conditions, Playtime showcased a Hulot whom the world had little time or sympathy for in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ironically, Hulot was essentially an “anti-establishment” character, and while his message of the dangers of depersonalization may have been timely, his age and his gentle comic methods were out of step with moviegoers of the era. Placing his trust in the audience, Tati refused to force his gags—instead letting us freely and democratically select what we wanted to see from within his vast, enveloping, generous images. The failure of that trust broke his heart and his pocketbook, and sent Tati into bankruptcy.

NEXT STOP … Jour de Fete, Mon Oncle, Our Hospitality

1967 108m/C FR Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Jacqueline Lecomte, Jack Gautier; D: Jacques Tati. VHS HMV, NLC