Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Playtime was the fourth feature film of Jacques Tati (1908-1982) and is sometimes considered his masterpiece. We have to be grateful to the man for what he sacrificed in bringing this film to fruition, but is it a masterpiece?
Historical Background: Tati blew his wad making Playtime back in 1968. It was ten years in the planning (Tati's previous film, Mon Oncle, was released in 1958) and three years in production. Tati spent an enormous amount of money building the sets for the film on the outskirts of Paris, complete with modernistic skyscraper facades, airport terminal, nightclub and city streets. There were even two actual office towers constructed, one complete with a working escalator. The set was quickly dubbed "Tativille." He spent so liberally that he was soon beset by financial difficulties. The banks ultimately impounded the film as collateral against his mounting debts. When Playtime finally made it into theaters, it quickly won critical acclaim, but was rejected by the public. It flopped so badly, in fact, the Tati had great difficulty securing funding for his later films, Traffic (1971) and Parade (1974), the latter a quasi-documentary made for television. How ironic, then, that today Playtime is widely regarded as Tati's visionary masterpiece – a prescient and melancholy lament on the contrivances of modern living. After the completion of Playtime, "Tativille" became a tourist attraction for a few years. Tati had hoped that it would be left standing for the use of other filmmakers, but, in still another irony, it was torn down to make way for a modern highway!
Tati was only able to make six feature films during his career. His first feature film was Jour de Fête (1949). The character Mr. Hulet first appeared in Tati's second feature film, Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953), and returned in Mon Oncle (1958) and then Playtime. Jacques Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff on October 9th, 1908, the grandson of an ambassador of the Russian Tsar, assigned to Paris. Tati initially studied art, planning to join his father's art restoration and framing business, but was drawn to the entertainment business in the 1930's. He performed as a mime in music halls and cabarets and later perfected, in his films, his craft of precisely choreographed sight gags, manipulations of the physical environment, and comic sound effects. His style is generally reminiscent of such performers as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rowan Atkinson (as Mr. Bean), and Peter Sellers (as Inspector Clouseau).
The Story: The film transpires mainly in four settings. The opening set is a modern Parisian airport. Passengers are arriving while others sit in the waiting room. The atmosphere is shiny and sterile, dominated by tile floors and acrylic chairs and counter tops. The varied people who come and go include a military officer, nuns, businessmen, and many tourists from America, Britain, and Germany. Each has a distinctive look and gait. The air is full of noises, from the clicking of heels on the tile, to the buzzing of some kind of generator, the sounds of babies crying, the drone of the traffic outside, and rolling wheels of luggage carriers. Fragments of conversations fill the air but with no discernible sense of anything actually being communicated. The ubiquitous public address system spews forth garbled announcements in multilingual gibberish. A platoon of American tourists is herded through the terminal onto buses headed for various hotels. An old man arrives and is met by a photographer who back-peddles as he snaps pictures. Mr. Hulot briefly appears, amid the crush of tourists. Through the remainder of the film, the tourists periodically reappear, typically being escorted about town by slickly clad tour operators. They are herded from one sterile environment to another, never spying the traditional wonders of Paris except as reflections in the endless panes of glass.
The second part of the film finds Hulot arriving at a large sterile, almost cubist, office building, apparently to keep an appointment with a man who works there. In the lobby, travel posters for various favorite tourist sites around the world all feature identical modern high-rise office buildings like the one Hulot has just entered. The receptionist announces his arrival through an electronic panel that turns out to be an elaborate intercom. Uncertain of how the countless lights, switches, and knobs operate, the receptionist ends up setting off a slew of unanticipated noises. Mr. Hulot is told to wait in a nearby chair. Soon we see a man approaching down an enormously long corridor, his heels clicking, interminably, as he approaches. The man greets Hulot and escorts him into another waiting room. The chairs in this lounge have cushions and backs that make squeaking noises when compresses or released. Another man arrives and is soon entertaining us with a series of sound effects as he sits, brushes off the front of his jacket, coughs, and so forth. The newcomer is invited into the adjacent office ahead of Hulot. Then, when he leaves, Hulot is left to wait some more. The man Hulot has come to see walks out of his office and right past Hulot, apparently busy with some pressing matter. Hulot tries to follow, but is soon lost in the labyrinthine hallways, conference rooms, and complexes of office cubicles. Caught in a swell of tourist traffic, Hulot is drawn into an elevator and ends up at a trade convention for modern furniture and appliances. We watch demonstrations of a push broom with headlights and "silent doors," that look like wood, feel like wood, but are absolutely silent when slammed. "They slam in golden silence," is the sales pitch. The salesman mistakes Hulot for the man who had earlier rifled through his desk and heatedly chews Hulot out, periodically walking through one of the doors in a huff and slamming it – silently. Later, Hulot finds his way out of the office building and runs into a succession of old army buddies. One invites him to his home, which is an apartment on the first floor, with a massive picture window that opens directly onto the sidewalk outside. All the apartments in this building have a similar design, so that these folks may as well be living in fish bowls.
The third part of the film takes place in an upscale, elegant restaurant. It is the opening night for this freshly finished modern marvel – except that it is not so well finished as it ought to be. There are lots of kinks that emerge over the course of the evening. The food window has been cut too small for the serving trays, a tile comes loose and sticks to the maître de's shoe, the table edges shear the coats of the waiters, and a crack in the floor snaps the high heels of the ladies. One of the waiters is constantly grooming and preening. Hulot arrives and promptly shatters the glass door. After the mess is cleaned up, the doorman continues to hold the doorknob and feigns opening the door as people arrive and depart and none are any the wiser for it. One of the staff spends the evening standing idly next to a doorway but is periodically called upon to trade an item of his clothing for the corresponding damaged piece of one of the other waiters – first a torn jacket, later a damaged shoe, and finally a gravy stained bow tie, until the man is reduced to a tattered wreck. There's a band and a dance floor and pretty soon there's a gay old time in progress. People of all sizes and shapes are swingin' their hips and throwing about their torsos. Among the customers at the nightclub is a somewhat crass but ebullient American (probably a Texan), who tosses his money around – for the best table or to treat those to whom he takes a shine. Hulot, who is a tall sort of fellow, offers to help the man retrieve an article that has gotten itself caught in the ceiling, but, in so doing, causes a section of the ceiling to collapse. The band promptly quits. An American woman, who has taken a bit of a shine to Hulot, volunteers to play the piano. Another woman joins in singing and the shift to this more lyrical mood music from the preceding hot jazz is accompanied by a change in the mood of the assembled crowd.
After the club closes, Hulot and some of the others cross the street to a drugstore for a morning cup of coffee. Hulot's American friend has to catch her tour bus, but Hulot manages to give her a parting gift of a silk scarf, though he cannot deliver it personally, because he gets hemmed in when a not-so-narrow woman occludes a narrow passageway. The streets outside are filling up with morning traffic. There's a rotary where all sorts of vehicles seem to be circling endlessly as though parts of a carousel. Massive arching streetlights tower overhead creating additional intrusive and impersonal geometric patterns.
Themes: On the surface, the principal theme seems to be the dehumanizing effect of modern urban life, architecture, and mechanization. Hulot wanders through this artificial world with such pathos, however, that one gets the feeling that Tati is more whimsically fascinated than distraught about the irresistible rush into a sterile future. After all, the sets for this film were Tati's own creations rather than a fait accompli. Tati's earlier films explored the conflict between tradition and change, the old and the new, but in Playtime, we're in a post-bellum era in which tradition has finally and totally succumbed. There are no more quaint old buildings competing with the high-rise complexes and skyscrapers.
Tati seems to reserve his sharper barbs for the vanities of various cultures, especially American coarseness and banality. At the same time, he is deriding his fellow Frenchmen for allowing their own unique cultural heritage to be diluted and contaminated by Americanization. This last point may account, in part, for the poor reception that Playtime received from the French public at the time of its release.
Production Values: Tati wanted to downplay the Hulot character in this film and make Playtime more of an ensemble piece. Though the hapless Hulot is the character that ties the vignettes together, the film is composed of a cast of hundreds, each participating in his or her own way in the delicious sight gags. Though the film has a measured rhythm to it, there is so much going on in each frame that it's simply impossible to absorb it all in a single viewing. Tati used every corner of the frame, often having multiple antics transpiring simultaneously. Every moment is richly conceived and precisely choreographed. There are some recurrent motifs, such as a number of "faux-Hulets" passing through various scenes.
To describe this film as "not plot intensive" would be a severe understatement. There is no discernible plot beyond the inference that Hulot has an appointment to see a man in an office building about some unspecified business. What's even more interesting is that the film also has precious little dialog. There are snippets of conversation, but they have pretty much the character of being part of the ambient background noise rather than real communication. There are characters speaking in French, German, American-English, and the King's English, but most of what they say is meaningless, except to reveal the foibles unique to each of the cultures. Tati's brilliance is the observational kind. He reveals human nature through situations and behavior.
The sets are perhaps the standout feature of this film. From the linear and cubicle forms to the pristine tile and acrylic surfaces, the sets leave no doubt that this is a frightening modern world where sterility threatens to obliterate our collective humanity. Massive expanses of glass panels, partitions, and ill-placed columns isolate the individuals and obstruct all manner of interactions and communication.
Playtime was the first and, apparently, only movie ever shot in Europe with 70mm film. The result is a visual clarity and perfection of color schemes beyond what you'll encounter in most any other film. The intelligence and complexity of the shot compositions rivals the best of Renoir, Eisenstein, and Dreyer. Every scene in Playtime was also meticulously color coordinated by Tati.
With Tati, sound is as important, in its own way, as cinematography. Tati is an unsurpassed master of sound mixing. For Tati, the dehumanizing quality of the modern environment has as much to do with sound clutter as with the visual sterility of modern architecture. Heels click, clothing swishes, equipment beeps and rattles, and the traffic roars. Worst of all, language is reduced to just another part of the aural pollution.
As a performer, Tati has less to do with this film's appeal than in his previous features. Certainly he's there, with his subtle miming and beautifully awkward physicality, but the humor emanates more from the clever manipulations of the background environment, by Tati the director. As usual, Tati is dressed a bit like Sherlock Holmes while comporting himself more like Poirot.
Bottom-Line: At the time of this writing, Playtime is hard to find in America, unless one is willing to pay top-dollar for the out-of-print Criterion DVD. Criterion has scheduled a re-release for the near future and my recommendation is that you wait until that time. I purchased my copy from Brazil. It has subtitle options in Portuguese, English, or Spanish. The film, of course, is in French. The cover script for my version is in Portuguese, but that matters little. The quality of the video print looks excellent to me, though I haven't seen the restored Criterion DVD, which is supposedly superb. The original Criterion DVD had a couple of extras not included with my Brazilian product: an effusive introduction by Terry Jones and a Tati short entitled Cours du Soir. Both receive faint praise from reviewers of the Criterion DVD.
Tati exists in his own world – a world not shared by any other filmmaker and a world that we, as viewers, can only visit and marvel at. Tati was a courageous visionary who put all of his tangible worldly wealth on the line to create a colorful world of the imagination. The film is not flawless. It suffers a bit from its length (120 minutes is a long time for a film without a plot) and a bit more from a less than conclusive ending. It's not a laugh-out-loud kind of humor, for the most part. It is a challenge to one's attention span and I'm glad to have seen this film at home, where I could stop the DVD a couple of times to break it up a bit. Even with those limitations, Playtime deserves to be labeled a masterpiece – for its creative inventiveness and originality. A masterpiece, albeit a flawed one.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
Bachelor M. Hulot once again blunders his way through Paris, this time with a group of American tourists. Directed by Jacques Tati.More at HotMovieSale.com
Jacques Tati s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. ...More at Buy.com
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