Playtime (1967)

(Criterion Streaming, December 2022) If my growing awareness of film history has taught me something, it’s that while film formulas have been with us for a long time, you can still find plenty of examples of sui generis movies—titles that did something so specific and so well that there’s still scarcely anything else like it. I would defy anyone to find anything quite like Jacques Tati’s Playtime, for instance—a film so ambitious in scope that Tati had a mini-city (“Tativille”) built expressly to film it. Tati wasn’t a neophyte by then—his previous films had been commercial and critical successes, and he could almost ask for a blank check. Of course, you can guess what happened—Playtime became the most expensive French film up to that time, and the very expensive set became the centrepiece of a very long shoot exacerbated by Tati’s ambition and perfectionism. At the time, Playtime’s critical success did not translate into box-office returns. Considering the expensive nature of the film, it led to Tati’s bankruptcy and essentially ended his career. I mention this not merely as anecdote, but to give you an idea of the no-expenses-spared nature of the film. Tati, for better or for worse, got exactly what he wanted with that film: he attained near-godlike powers on how to attain his creative vision, and that vision carries through to the day. A typical shot of Playtime has Tati’s “Monsieur Hulot” alter ego wandering somewhere in a vast yet austere white-black-and-gray frame of ultramodern glass and concrete. He is looking for humanity in an increasingly mechanical world, and the frame lingers long enough that loitering becomes one of the film’s themes. Striking compositions abound, but the camera seldom moves. The colours are those of glass-and-steel architecture, but there’s usually a flash of bright colour (usually red) somewhere in the frame. Wittier critics than I have called the aesthetics of the film similar to “Where’s Waldo?” books, and that’s a striking comment. It will eventually influence your viewing experience: Make sure you can see Playtime on the biggest, most high-resolution source you can find. I initially started watching it on a slightly blurry “High Definition” (1080) TV channel, and was so annoyed by the lack of resolution that I switched halfway through to a 4K streaming source and was struck by the improvement. Playtime, in fitting with its scattershot critique of modernity, is not a plotted film: Hulot ambles in and out of the frame, letting the film play its episodic gags. There are roughly six major sequences in the entire film, the longest of which is a near-real-time description of an upper-class restaurant’s opening-night self-destruction. Calling Playtime a comedy is accurate and yet insufficient: it’s a viewing experience like no other. I can’t say that I liked it a lot (philosophically, I cast my lot with the modernists, and I think that Tati’s lack of restraints revealed his self-indulgence), but my admiration for the result is considerable. Like it or not, Playtime remains a cinema landmark.