Jacques Tati’s 1967 Playtime depicts an urban enclave of International-Style architecture, ubiquitous technology, commodified encounters, and alienated people that manages, somehow, to result in a comedic romance in which folks learn to find their way in a city that doesn’t function as efficiently as its planners would hope. Playtime marks the return of the director’s hapless alter ego, M. Hulot, who stumbles through a glass maze of overlapping and interconnected enclosures -- office spaces, convention spaces, transportation spaces, domestic spaces, pleasure spaces -- searching for a bureaucratic functionary, meeting an old army buddy, and occasionally encountering Barbara, an American tourist with whom he engages in an anonymous romance. Throughout the film Hulot appears from time to time, sometimes portrayed by Tati, sometimes as a double. We also witness Barbara being pulled along through various scenes on a tourist excursion through the glass city. But neither of them can fairly be said to be the film’s protagonists. Tati intended for them to share the same significance as the other hundreds of characters and extras that crowded his cinematic frame.

As such, Playtime defies easy orientation. It is a comedy, a romance, a farce, and a social commentary. The film also defies easy viewing. Tati shot his urban comedy in 70-millimeter format and refused to employ close-ups to fix his audience’s attention on particular details. Instead, the film presents a broad and largely undifferentiated canvas in which each portion of the frame contains humorous interactions, structural details, and site gags. Contributing to Playtime’s disorienting tableau, Tati weaves together a soundscape of multi-lingual dialogue and sound effects that both comments upon the film’s imagery and confounds the audience’s efforts to fix meaning upon a particular component of the frame. The film’s dialogue offers some degree of narrative direction but is largely superfluous. Like a Chaplin film, Playtime possess charms similar to those found in a silent film, though students of aural landscapes would decry that notion. Despite its occasionally frustrating construction, Tati’s film offers a lighthearted lens upon modernity that, despite its initial gloom, reveals an optimistic potential for urbanity to transform itself into a playground.

un film de Jacques Tati
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Hulot stands behind a map of the world: just points on a grid. Hulot looks over a mezzanine level upon a cube farm.
Barbara spots the Eiffel Tower reflected in a glass door. Hulot visits an army buddy living in a grid of television screens.
A travel agency suggests that all places look like office parks. Strangers watch televisions, not each other.  

Off-campus webpages

Pedro Blas Gonzalez's Jacques Tati: Last Bastion of Innocence: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/37/tati.html

Tativille: The Official Site of Jacques Tati: http://www.tativille.com/

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