Playtime

1967 film by Jacques Tati
the 1967 film

Playtime (stylized as PlayTime and also written as Play Time) is a 1967 comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. In the film, Tati again plays Monsieur Hulot, the popular character who had central roles in his earlier films Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958). However, Tati grew ambivalent towards playing Hulot as a recurring central role during production; he appears intermittently in Playtime, alternating between central and supporting roles. Shot on 70 mm, the work is notable for its enormous set, which Tati had built specially for the film, as well as Tati's trademark use of subtle yet complex visual comedy supported by creative sound effects; dialogue is frequently reduced to the level of background noise. Playtime is considered Tati's masterpiece and his most daring work. In 2022, Playtime was 23rd on the British Film Institute's critics' list and 41st in their directors' list of "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time". The film was a financial failure upon release but is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.

Playtime is set in a futuristic, hyperconsumerist Paris. The story is structured in six sequences, linked by two characters who repeatedly encounter one another over the course of a day: Barbara, a young American tourist visiting Paris with an American tourist group, and Monsieur Hulot, a befuddled Frenchman lost in the new modernity of Paris. The sequences are as follows:
The Airport: The American tour group arrives at the ultra modern and impersonal Orly Airport. 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. The Trade Exhibition: 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, while the Paris of legend goes all but unnoticed save for a flower seller's stall and a single reflection of the Eiffel Tower in a glass door. Later, a similar reflection shows Monmartre. The Apartments: As night falls, M. Hulot meets with 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 M. 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. At the restaurant, M. 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. The Carousel of Cars: M. 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, the tourists' bus returns to the airport.

When possible, Tati cast nonprofessionals. He wanted people whose inner essence matched their characters and who could move in the way he wanted.

In the 1960s, French president Charles de Gaulle made a vow to develop his country's economy and reform Paris into a modern city. Knocking down older houses in urban Right Bank districts, developers rebuilt parts of the city and its suburbs and put up modernized blocks of glass and steel in their place. High rise structures were allowed within Paris for the first time, and their anonymous façades soured the City of Lights' historical atmosphere and represented an unsightly contrast to her famous monuments. The city of the future was on its way, and its expansion was modeled according to dull, functional, pointedly Americanized specifications. During this time, filmmaker Jacques Tati, who had grown up in the earthy quarters of Paris and lived there most of his life, decided to make a film about the ache of losing his old Paris to a more contemporary cityscape. To accomplish this, Tati conceived a most ingenious and maniacal idea: he would build a city of his own design, on which he could shoot freely and have absolute control. His crew called it Tativille.

Upon its release in 1967, PlayTime was the most expensive film ever made in France. And yet, it contains almost no story and its dialogue is mostly inconsequential. Like Tati's other pictures, the dialogue has been post synchronized and its volume turned down to direct our attention to forms of behavior and visual gags in the impractical spaces he has chosen to depict. Fore, middle, and backgrounds are all in crisp focus and ready for our eyes to explore, occupied at times by, among a whole population of others, Tati's famous alter ego Monsieur Hulot. Hulot first appeared in M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) and then Mon Oncle (1958). With his long stemmed pipe, raincoat and hat, and his pants often too short, Hulot moves about somewhat lost outside of his "old quarter" of Paris, bemused and confounded by urbanization and modern gadgetry. An iconic figure as connected to Tati as the Little Tramp was to Charles Chaplin, Hulot also represented an artistic hindrance for Tati, who by the early sixties wanted to move beyond his beloved character and explore whole environments more than a Hulot centric narrative and gags. Nevertheless, without Hulot's popularity, any commercial prospects for PlayTime would have been nonexistent, and so Hulot, although present in the film, has a minimal role. Like all characters and spaces within the frame, Hulot becomes part of the scenery; he disappears for long patches of screentime, seemingly lost in the bustle of the modernized world. Tati observed that the cost of building the set was no greater than what it would have cost to have hired Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren for the leading role. so that all the actors and their physical movements would be visible, even when they were in the far background of a group scene. He used sound rather than visual cues to direct the audience's attention; with the large image size, sound could be both high and low in the image as well as left and right. As with most Tati films, sound effects were utilized to intensify comedic effect; Leonard Maltin wrote that Tati was the "only man in movie history to get a laugh out of the hum of a neon sign!" Almost the entire film was dubbed after shooting; the editing process took nine months. Philip Kemp has described the film's plot as exploring "how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line".

Tati's financial problems did not improve after PlayTime‘s first showings. On its original French release, Playtime was commercially unsuccessful, failing to earn back a significant portion of its production costs. The film was entered into the 6th Moscow International Film Festival, where it won a Silver Prize. Results were the same upon the film's eventual release in the United States in 1973 (even though it had finally been converted to a 35 mm format at the insistence of US distributors and edited down to 103 minutes). Though Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Playtime "Tati's most brilliant film", it was no more a commercial success in the US than in France. Debts incurred as a result of the film's cost overruns eventually forced Tati to file for bankruptcy. Complaints that the film was too long resulted in Tati, who could hardly afford to hire an editor, cutting down individual copies of the film from the original runtime of 140 minutes to under 120 minutes for general release. Tati assured the film community that the original 70mm negative remained in his possession, but after various re releases in the decades to come, the longest cut yet released runs 124 minutes. At the time, Tati's artistic integrity toward the project was both inspiring and debilitating. He intended PlayTime to be something new, a "spectacle cinématographique" featuring an exclusive first run showing with reservable seats, something more along the lines of live theater. He refused to provide some cinemas unequipped with 70mm projectors an altered 35mm version, and audiences further confounded by the lacking presence of the beloved M. Hulot added to the lukewarm responses. After all, Hulot barely utters a word in the film; although Tati's character says little in earlier incarnations, he at least spoke. And, in fact, the film's only dialogue consists of background chatter that amounts to ambient noise. Moreover, Tati had become worn down not only by the production itself, but by the negative press surrounding its ostentatiousness. That he refused interviews or to allow journalists on his set worsened matters. Negative press both before and after its release soured audience reactions, and Tati's financial troubles led to bankruptcy when he failed to secure a full U. S. distribution. Worse, shortly after its release, France was struck with the student revolts of May 1968 and everything else seemed unimportant. Not until years later, often after the required multiple viewings of PlayTime, did audiences and film scholars realize the film's true mastery. In their 2012 poll of critics and directors, Sight & Sound, published by the British Film Institute, put PlayTime on their prestigious "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" list.