Playtime: The magic of Jacques Tati
Adrian Martin
The Age, 8 April 2004

Imagine this: a film shot entirely without a close-up of a face, or an inserted detail of action; one without a central character and very little conventional dialogue. A film in which, for much of the time, you are watching not two or three people, but a dozen or 50, and not one of them is an insignificant or idling "extra". A film in which every edit wrenches you into a disorienting position; one that is impossible to take in entirely, even on the 20th viewing.

All this, and a comedy too. Welcome to Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967).

If you are not completely exhausted by the end of this film, then you have not been doing your work as a spectator. But never have work and play been so magnificently, deliriously confused as here.

Playtime is one of the true monuments of film history. But, like Citizen Kane, it took a while to find its rightful place in the canon. An expensive project that was a disastrous flop for Tati in its day, it quickly disappeared in its original 70-millimetre form.

Seeing it this way...is a rare treat for cinephiles -- akin to looking at a great painting up close, restored to its pristine condition.

You need to position yourself well...to take in Playtime properly. The film is, like no other I have seen, a total sensory experience, a whole world conjured on screen. You cannot lazily let your eye go to where the central action is playing out, because there is no central action. You have to try to master the entire frame -- an impossible, but immensely enjoyable challenge.

What is the content of Playtime? It is certainly not to be found in the slim, almost non-existent plotline. A group of American tourists arrive at a French airport, take a bus, shop, go to a restaurant on its chaotic opening night, take another bus.

Tati, in his famous comic persona of Monsieur Hulot, flits in and around the path of the tourists, trying and failing to keep an appointment. But watch out: Tati will keep fooling you with a seemingly endless number of Hulot look-alikes.

Is it satire on the modern world? Not quite. After Mon Oncle (1958), a transition film between his two perfect achievements, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) and this, Tati became known as a gentle social critic, a commentator on the alienation created by new technology and the dream of the "house of tomorrow". It was a label with which he felt uncomfortable. If Tati was a critic of anything, it was the ingrained habits of movie goers.

He aimed to liberate them from conventional patterns of looking and listening, feeling and imagining.

For this, he required a vast "playground", and the modern metropolis -- with its serial skyscrapers, shiny technology and overcrowding -- was where he created it. Or rather, re-created it, for Playtime is an awesome feat of set design and construction. He named this mini-city Tativille, and was bitterly disappointed when it was demolished.

There are many small, caustic jokes about tourism, advertising, the dwarfing of the individual by the corporation, and so on. But, essentially, the film is a celebration -- not so much of the "built environment", but the worlds we make inside that environment. For Tati, even to observe -- to glimpse something ephemeral, whimsical or surreal -- is to radically remake the world.

It is often said that films, including Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) are about architecture -- which usually means they contain a few striking shots of futuristic cityscapes and strange facades. But when it comes to the marriage of film and architecture, Playtime is the real deal. There is no movie in cinema history more intricately structured upon the dissolution of the boundary between public and private space.

Glass walls are ubiquitous, but not always visible, as a series of hilarious gags makes clear. An extraordinary sequence, not always present in the earlier 35-millimetre prints, shows two families side by side in "display lounge rooms", their actions mirroring and complementing each other without them knowing it.

This film is from an extraordinary moment in film history. Playtime, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and John Boorman's Point Blank, all from 1967 and 1968, are frankly experimental. They explore advanced formal techniques, and demand much of their audience. And yet, they hold on to and re-energise the popular conventions of comedy, sci-fi and crime fiction.

In a small way, Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2004), recaptures the glory of this moment. Going against all phony film industry wisdom, it, too, eschews plot, heroes, and a central conflict. Like Playtime, it offers the gradual, non-narrative description of a complex "event" or happening, and it rivets us to the force and significance of every camera movement, every edit, every well-chosen sound. As with Tati, the form does not "dress up" the content: it becomes the content.

But where Elephant is a gloomy look at social trauma, Playtime is a joyful dance. Watching and listening to this film, trying to keep up with its boundless invention, is like riding a wave. Your eyes dart everywhere, you are always trying to find the visual source for an odd sound. Every time the cameras perspective changes, you must quickly, mentally re-map the space and review what you have learnt about it.

Playtime builds to an astonishing, extended, frantically busy sequence in a restaurant. After 20 viewings of the film over as many years, I have not begun to exhaust the riches of this sequence. Even those Tati devotees who warm to the more sedate, focused humour of Jour de Fete (1940) and Monsieur Hulot's Holiday can feel at sea here.

Tati abandons the classic gag structure of set-up, development and pay-off, or rather, he scatters these stages so cagily, and has so many gags going at once, that you are forced to find the connections yourself.

Playtime is the only film I know that can make different spectators laugh at different things at the same time -- a disarming but wonderful experience.

Tati's dream was to make a kind of "expanded" cinema, with multiple points of focus -- like a circus arena -- a dream to which he returned in Parade (1974).

There is the merest hit of a romantic intrigue in Playtime -- between Hulot and an American tourist (Barbara Dennek). They scarcely meet and, in the final scene, are prevented from even saying goodbye by the impedimenta of a store and a street. But he manages to pass on to her, via an intermediary, a little trinket that echoes the shape of the lights on the highway. The woman simply says to her companion, "He gave me this."

How typical of the genius of Tati: to conclude on the token of a poignant present the grandest, most spectacular gift that any filmmaker gave.

This material is copyrighted by Adrian Martin.

LINKS:
• Jaime N. Christley: Jacques Tati
• Jacques Tati: A film history
• The Cinema of Jacques Tati
• Jacques Tati