Jacques Tati, 1967
[15 votes]
“Seeing Jacques Tati's Play Time
(1967) flawlessly projected in a gorgeous 70 mm print on the gigantic Virginia
Theatre screen at Ebertfest a few years ago was one of the great movie
experiences of my lifetime. Like so many movies we now consider among the best
ever made (among them Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Rules of the Game…), Play
Time was not a success when originally released.
“What happens in it? Barbara (Barbara
Dennek), an American tourist, visits Paris with a tour group. Monsieur Hulot
(Tati, as his character from M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle)
gets lost in a modern office complex, where he spontaneously hooks up with the
group as they are guided through a trade exhibition of the latest office
furniture and business gadgets. Later, M. Hulot runs into an old friend and
visits his modern glass-box apartment. Many of the characters come together in
a long, rambunctious restaurant scene in which a businessman who at first
appears to be an Ugly American, becomes the life of a lively impromptu
celebration. The next day, Barbara takes the bus, through a circular whirl of
traffic, back to the airport. Got that?
“Maybe it doesn't sound like much. But what
is it about? Everything. Mostly it's about paying attention to the world around
you, savoring its beauty and its absurdity (and, like Tati, I believe that few
things are more beautiful than the absurd). M. Hulot, and the movie
itself, is baffled and frustrated by urban modernity, regarding it with a cool
detachment that would seem almost anthropological if it weren't so funny and
poignant -- and if we and Hulot were not utterly immersed in it. The vortex of
city life spins all around us, and we can only observe in wonder.
“Observation -- it's what PlayTime does,
and what it is. Taking place in a city set built for the film on a studio
backlot, the movie is like a giant ant farm. Most often the camera stays
still and hangs back. Often, there is no single focus for the composition
(though the image is in deep-focus), encouraging your eyes to wander around the
frame. And that frame is teeming with lively details -- little comedies
and dramas (an airport janitor, a pair of nuns, a switchboard operator) playing
out simultaneously (in play-time, I suppose), all over the place, left and
right, top and bottom, foreground and background, for you to notice or not.
That's one reason it rewards as many re-viewings as you want to devote to it.
To invertibly paraphrase Hitchcock,
Play Time is more than a slice of cake; it's a big,
delicious, intoxicating slice of life.” ~ Jim Emerson
“The first hour of Play Time suggests
that this will be a comedy about the coldness of urbanization in big-city life.
Jacques Tati’s ‘Tativille’ set is majestic enough to call attention to itself, gleaming
architecture and all; despite the presence of Tati’s famous Monsieur Hulot
character in the cast, the film barely has anyone resembling a central
character to ground it; and in fact, Play Time doesn’t even have a
conventional plot, proceeding instead as a loosely connected series of gags,
sometimes many of them crammed into the same long take/wide shot. In those
ways, its free form follows its function of evoking the sometimes overwhelming
experience of living in a big city.
“But then comes its second hour: an extended
sequence set during the opening of a new restaurant in which pretty much
everything that could go wrong does, broken doors, falling ceilings and all.
None of this seems to faze any of the restaurant patrons, however. If anything,
these strangers, previously disconnected from each other thanks to the sheer
vastness of the metropolis in which they’re surrounded, finally find a way to
come together, even as the world around them seems to be falling apart. A funny
if critical take on the perils of modernization becomes an uplifting vision of
the possibility of making emotional connections, however fleeting, in a
potentially soulless environment. For all of Play Time’s formal and
narrative innovations, it’s Tati’s sense of humanity that has continued to
shine through.” ~ Kenji Fujishima
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