Playtime
I love Jacques Tati. Almost nothing cheers me up as quickly as watching one of his films, which is odd really, given that Tati was a very visual, physical comedian, and that isn’t normally the kind of thing I enjoy. But I just have to watch a few minutes of Monsieur Hulot walking — leaning forward, as if into a stiff headwind — and I’m in fits of laughter.
I’ve seen ‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’ many times, but recently we’ve rented some of his other films, and watched ‘Playtime’ last night. It wasn’t a success when first released, and eventually bankrupted Tati, because he spent a fortune building what amounted to an entire town for the set. For those reasons, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it as much as the other films, but I thought it was wonderful.
Tati films contain very little in the way of plot, but the plot of Playtime — such as it is — concerns the efforts of Monsieur Hulot to meet someone in an enormous modern office block. In this film, as in most of the others, Hulot is a kind of passive entropy generator. The world starts out clean and ordered, but when Hulot comes on the scene he unwittingly sets up a chain of events which result in chaos, by doing nothing more than wandering around in a benevolent but bewildered fashion.
It’s particularly clear in Playtime that this is a good thing: the clean, modern world depicted at the start of the film is sterile and alienating to humans. We see an elderly porter trying to contact the man Hulot has come to meet using a high-tech bank of switches and lights. It takes him several minutes of tentatively pressing buttons (getting incomprehensible patterns of flashing lights and beeps in return) before he actually manages to communicate with a person. The building is so vast and uniform that Hulot gets hopelessly lost within a short while of arriving. Considering it was made in the 60s, Playtime feels like a modern, satirical film about the perils of modern architecture and technology. When things start to unravel later in the film, the world feels like a much warmer and more friendly place, partly because the chaos means that people actually talk to one another.
There are some wonderfully clever visual puns in the film. A group of female American tourists are all wearing floral hats, and at the restaurant, a waiter appears to be watering their hats with champagne. The film is supposed to be set in Paris, but it is so modern and anonymous that it could be anywhere. However, occasionally when characters open the ubiquitous glass doors, they see the Eiffel Tower, or some other landmark reflected in the door. There’s also a brilliant joke about a patent ‘silent’ door, being shown at a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. For complicated reasons, the Director of the company believes that Hulot is the man who has been rifling through their office doors, and shouts at him for his presumption before flouncing off through his silent door, slamming it — completely noiselessly — behind him. I’m going to have to watch it again soon, because I’m sure that there were probably lots of jokes I missed.
1
About 100 years ago I saw Holiday and found it frustrating; his inability to carry out the most simple task drove me to distraction, the only part I remember with any pleasure is the dough hanging on the hook.
Playtime has a certain resonance, particularly today. I was at the Boat Show at the Excell, and returning to the underground car-park convinced myself, and their security people, that my car had been stolen, so sure was I that I knew exactly where I left it in the Purple car-park. Unfortunately, the Purple section stretches the whole, considerable, length of the building, each bay being identical. Embarrassingly, it transpired that I was one bay out.........................
by Jonathan Briggs @ 20/01/2008 8:38 pm • Permalink •
2
I share your love of his films. He was incomparable. Though he made few films each one is almost perfect. There is a rather delightful (if appropriately confusing) official website dedicated to him and his films called http://www.tativille.com/. It's worth a look if you are a fan anyway.
by ThoughtBadger @ 21/01/2008 3:44 pm • Permalink •
3
Jonathan Briggs: I think Tati made the kind of films you either love to bits or can't see the point of. Your car park experience does sound like a classic Hulot situation, though
ThoughtBadger: I haven't seen that site before. It makes you explore and play around with it, which is nice. It also has a clip of the porter/intercom panel scene, though I have no idea how to link to it!
by bsag @ 21/01/2008 6:49 pm • Permalink •
Page 1 of 1 pages