In Playtime, Jacques Tati creates a delightful modernity satirizing urbanity, technology, and confusion, delivering a paean to a hapless humanity dwelling in Paris, regimented with absurd furniture, lookalike vehicles, and countless windows of transparent glass. This is the tyranny of a time engulfed by the history to come, sometime between the pager and the internet, when the novelty of towering industry was still a fascination, and an endless, bewitching perplexity.
The opening credits appear over a sky mottled by clouds, leading into a Paris featuring the latest architectural marvels and the uniformity of a new era. Two nuns strolling abreast enter a building through glass doors, strolling into a concourse where, on a row of couches, a man and his spouse sit amiably with their child. Certain personages, imperturbable in long shot, approach the camera along the concourse; the wife, noticing one of the them, turns to her husband and says, “look, an officer,” and indeed an officer is strolling, wearing large boots that soon move out of the frame.
The shot continues, static and observant, and from the other side of the concourse, silence percolating through many stalls and cubicles, a janitor enters with a broomstick, looks both ways, then begins sweeping here and there until he too retreats. The camerawork and the style of the film, its essential motivation, is that of the observer: passive, curious, wry, beneficent. Roger Ebert, noting this unique style, writes of Playtime that “instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation,”[1] his words distilling the mainspring of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece. The camera in Playtime is the most deft of observers, and the most generous.
The passivity of the camera belies the complex composition of the shots, some of them being so intricate, so feverish, that simultaneous actions occur in the background, middle ground, and foreground; the viewer thus has no other option than a frantic amusement, trying to absorb the action onscreen and failing, experiencing the unique pleasure of knowing that Playtime repays attention and repeated screenings. Not only the composition but the humor of these shots demand the viewer’s investment; inseparable from the teeming frame, the drollery touches on the many kinds of absurdity, of which Romney writes that “Tati makes us look, listen, scan through the mass of information and event on screen; we help make the comedy happen.”[2] In so unsparing a lark, the roughly two-hour runtime ensures that the bustling vivacity of Tati’s creation contains detail enough for repeated screenings, so that one can begin to approach the enchantment of the film.
In the airport concourse, featuring an aged and stooped man, short and wizened, responding to French paparazzi excited by his apparent celebrity, he exhibits a somnolent weariness as a foil to the tumult engulfing him; a group of gadfly American women, middle-aged, collectively flutter and giggle; Mr. Hulot enters an office building on business, awaiting another short man with resonant footwear, trekking down an endless hallway toward Mr. Hulot, who is cautioned against meeting him; devilish, impenetrable, a panel of buttons appears and reappears later in the film, befuddling as completely; Mr. Hulot wanders an exhibition of product designs, one of which is a broom with headlights, another a system of doors with the advertisement, “Slam your Doors in Golden Silence”. A panoply of absurdities gush from this confused urban hothouse, triumphing during the jaunts of its many denizens.
As the sunlight dims in the city and the story transitions into night, the ambience of streetlights and silhouettes deepens, and the cinematography of Jean Badal and Andréas Winding becomes playful with the interiors; one instance of this playfulness is their shooting of a convenience store, in which desserts, marshaled atop the counter under neon light, become noxious objects and unappetizing grotesquerie. From day to night, then to day, and at last to twilight as the bus, conveying the group of American women to the airport, meanders along overlapping roads marked by receding street lights–this is the most delicate and immersive shot of the film, providing the capstone to the previous day’s enchantment, consolidating all the confusion and novelty into subtle and ticklish memory, which is to be cherished as much as the characters.
The satire of Playtime is more playful than biting, but the bite can be impressive; its satirical strength comes from its freewheeling but static long shots, and its patient awareness while evoking the complexity of human interaction, which Romney points up when writing that “in its quiet way, Playtime expresses a satiric outrage at the antiseptic nature of modern life, but its take on urban alienation is nothing if not joyous.”[3] With this affirmation I could not agree more. Although he was to be bankrupted by a film whose critical acclaim was overcome by widespread unpopularity, Jacques Tati took his observational daredevilry to new heights, and his creative dedication merits a lasting repute whose apex is, of course, the perennial Playtime.
- Roger Ebert. “Playtime,” rogerebert.com, August 29 2004, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-playtime-1967 ↑
- Jonathan Romney. “Jacques Tati’s Playtime,” theguardian.com, October 24 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/24/jacques-tati-playtime-intensely-complex-life-affirming-comedy ↑
- Jonathan Romney. “Jacques Tati’s Playtime” ↑
