Playtime
“Playtime”
is the third Tati film on the List, following “Mon Oncle” from 1958. I loved “Mon
Oncle” as I also liked “Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot” and so I was expecting
great things from “Playtime”.
This time
Monsieur Hulot, Tati’s character, is visiting an ultra-modern environment in
Paris. First there is an airport, cool, straight and soulless. Then we visit an
office building in glass and steel with cubicles, uniformed attendants and
everything kept in grey and black tones. Hulot is visiting this place to ask
for a job, but he keeps missing the man he is supposed to meet and in this
extremely streamlined place Hulot sticks out like a sore thumb.
Hulot proceeds
to a trade fair where he keeps being mistaken for being someone else. He is
invited into an apartment home where his host is intent on showing off their
material wealth and finally, he ends up in a fancy restaurant, the Royal
Garden.
Meanwhile a
tourist woman, following a tour group, visits more or less the same places and
their paths cross each other a few times.
This is not
much of a story, but that is also the point. With “Playtime” Tati was
apparently rebelling against the idea that a movie needs a screenplay. “Playtime”
is a series of tableaux on the modern world alienating humanity and the
progression through the movie is not that of a story, but the gradual breakdown
of the streamlined world into a human world.
This unique
and innovative idea is what makes “Playtime” special. It is its strength and it
is its weakness. Tati gives himself the freedom to compose exactly the scenes he
wants, letting his Hulot character stand in contrast to the uniformity of
modern life. That means we get a fairly complete vision and many of these
tableaux are truly interesting. But it is also its fundamental problem. This is
a 119 minute long movie without a story. How long can you actually watch scenes
where nothing is actually happening? Sure, this is a comedy, and Hulot is
charming, many of the scenes are curious, but few are outright funny, at least
until we get to the restaurant in the end where the movie enters into
slapstick. Yet this restaurant scene is 45 minutes long! It has to be tremendously
funny to be worth that long a watch. ¨
This does
make me strangely torn on this movie. I had to break it up in pieces not to get
bored, yet many of the scenes are truly brilliant. I cannot for the life of me
see why the restaurant scene has to last 45 minutes, yet it is magnificent. Much
of what is great in this movie are in the small details. Guests sitting in the
restaurant get a stamp on their backs from the poorly designed chairs, the
doorman holds a doorknob to pretend there is a door after it is gone, the
dishes the restaurant serves are all the same and the food never leaves the
trays. Much of this is not laugh out loud funny, but comical in a quieter way.
That is nice, but is it good enough to carry you through so long a movie
without a progressing story?
I get the criticism
of modern life and it is well placed and executed. It is visionary in scale and
style, with enormous and expensive sets built for the movie. Apparently, Paris
did not yet at the time of filming have such a neighborhood, Tati built it from
scratch. I just wonder if Tati is not shooting sparrows with cannons here and
thus over-do it.
I must recommend
this movie, it is one to have seen at least once, but personally I much preferred
“Mon Oncle”.