Summary
A party of American tourists land at Paris Airport and embark on a one-day sightseeing
tour of the French capital. The famous landmarks have long since been replaced by
towering office blocks and only a few signs of old Paris remain - for example, an old
woman selling flowers on a street corner. Meanwhile, Monsieur Hulot has an appointment
with an important official, but ends up getting lost in the maze of modern offices.
Later, Hulot runs into the tourists at an exhibition of new inventions, which include
a silent door and a broom with headlights. Having met up with an old army friend
in his modern apartment, Hulot rejoins the American tourists at a chic night club, the
Royal Garden. The latter has just opened for business and is encountering
more than a few teething problems...
Review
The film that torpedoed Jacques Tati’s filmmaking career, effectively marginalising one
of France’s most inventive and daring film directors, Playtime is now almost universally
considered to be a cinematic masterpiece and a work of immense creative vision.
With its ambitious sets and striking cinematography, the film paints an initially disturbing
picture of technological progress but then goes on to show how human beings can adapt
and survive in such an apparently dehumanised world.
Playtime follows directly on from Tati’s previous film, Mon
Oncle and shows a Paris that has been totally transformed into a soulless metropolis
of glass and steel. In spite of this, American tourists still flock to the city,
to take photographs of skyscrapers, reassured that the place is not too dissimilar to
what they have back home. Not everyone is comfortable with this technological
utopia – and Monsieur Hulot seems to have more difficulty than most in coping with this
new way of life. Although Hulot does not have a large part in the film, he serves
to emphasise how alien this future world would be to a contemporary cinema audience.
The endless metallic corridors and huge open spaces dwarf the bumbling Hulot has he struggles
vainly to come to terms with this dehumanised environment. Homes have been converted
into something akin to shop windows, with their owners proudly showing off their possessions
and lifestyles to passers-by.
In the second half of the film, the mood begins to change and, rather like a slow thaw,
we start to glimpse signs of humanity oozing out of this colourless cold setting.
Hulot meets an old friend and then finds himself in an upmarket nightclub, which gets
livelier as the night progresses. The moral is that no matter how inhuman
their surroundings become, human beings will always remain human and, when they come together,
can find a way to enjoy life. Tati’s viewpoint is, as ever, one of sublime optimism,
although he reveals this only after having scared us with his chillingly cold vision of
a future dominated by bland uniformity and a militaristic lack of individuality.
For those who hate modern cities and adore cities like Paris, the film paints a depressing
picture of the future. Here we may glimpse, perhaps in our mind's eye or in distorted
reflections in glass doors, distant images of the Arc de Triomphe or the Tour
d’Eiffel, but, in truth, all that remains of the old world are picture postcards and
a few rare street peddlers. Not only have the French monuments vanished, but
it looks as if the French language is heading for extinction. With typical Tati-esque
irony, the film’s title Playtime (used in place of Récreation) reflects
the French people’s eagerness to adopt English words to appear sophisticated. By
doing so, of course, they merely hasten the demise of their own language and serve as
willing participants in the creation of a future world of bland uniformity, without any
cultural diversity. "What is the French for drugstore?" an American
tourist asks a Frenchman. "Drugstore" is the immediate response.
Playtime is stylistically a very different work to Tati’s previous films, and it
this possibly which resulted in its lukewarm reception on its initial release.
The comedy is noticeably more sophisticated, less burlesque, than in, say, Les Vacances
de Monsieur Hurlot, and the fact that Hulot plays a comparatively minor part in the
film may have disappointed many spectators. There is also far more content
crammed into Playtime than in Tati’s earlier films. Try to absorb all of
the detail in the Royal Garden scenes and you are most likely to get a migraine.
It is simply impossible to absorb the amount of information in this film in a simple viewing
- it demands at least three or four viewings, and even then there is always some new surprise
awaiting the spectator. In Playtime, Tati pushed himself further than he
perhaps realised into refining his technique, perfecting a form of art which no cinema
audience had seen previously or will probably ever see again. The critic and filmmaker
François Truffaut best summed this up in a letter to Tati: "It is a film
which comes from another planet where they make films differently. Playtime is
perhaps Europe of 1968 filmed by the first Martian filmmaker".
Playtime took almost three years to complete and was released a decade after Mon
Oncle. Whilst it achieved some degree of success in France (attracting around
one million cinema goers), it came nowhere near to recouping its monumental production
costs (estimated at around ten million French francs). The result was near-bankruptcy
for its director, who had used up his own savings and borrowed heavily to finance the
film. For the rest of his career, Tati was no longer the master of his own destiny
- he had far less control over his subsequent films and had to surrender the rights of
his previous films to his creditors.
The main expense for the film was its extravagant location set, a miniature city representing
the future Paris. Occupying a site of 15 000 square metres, the set, nicknamed "Tativille"
took over 100 workers five months to build, and it included mock-ups of two full size
tower blocks. Before filming was completed, the set was badly damaged in a storm,
incurring a cost of around a million francs to effect the repairs.
When the film initially failed to attract cinema audiences, the distributors compelled
Tati to make some drastic cuts to the film to reduce it to a more acceptable length.
Various cut versions of the film ended up in circulation, and the original print has since
badly deteriorated. Thirty years after the film’s initial release, the film was
painstakingly restored by director Jérôme Deschamps and Tati’s daughter Sophie
Tatischeff. Released in 2002, the restored version of Playtime was received
with glowing reviews across the world.
Jacques Tati sacrificed literally everything he had to make Playtime, which he
believed would be his greatest work. Unfortunately, as was often the case in his
career, Tati was years ahead of his time and his genius was not fully appreciated until
after his death. It has taken nearly three decades for Playtime to acquire
the standing it deserves, one of the greatest films in cinema history.
© James Travers 2002
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