Playtime, 1967.
Directed by Jacques Tati.
Starring Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek and Rita Maiden.
SYNOPSIS:
Monsieur Hulot battles the modern architecture and technology of Paris, creating pockets of benign chaos through to the early morning.
Playtime opens on an airport lounge for what feels like ages. People are dwarfed in the longshot, going about their business. After a while, the static camera’s reason becomes apparent. This is a film dictated by its environment, not those that inhabit it. The precise way each character moves, the exact lines of latitude they travel across…they are nothing but cogs in some vast machine.
But then appears a cog that doesn’t quite fit. He walks on his toes, as though in constant danger of falling forward, and his trousers are slightly too short, revealing the bright socks that clash with the rest of his outfit. He doesn’t move in the predetermined routes of others. He drops things, bumps into people, bouncing through the space like a clumsy, umbrella-holding pinball. This is Monsieur Hulot.
Playtime is a film with Monsieur Hulot in, rather than a film about Monsieur Hulot. Some portions of the movie proceed entirely without him. But all the characters involved are in some way at odds with the architecture and technology that surround them. Playtime is about all of us, and our displacement in modern times.
Buster Keaton was the same. You can see so in the season devoted to him at the BFI this January, aptly named Serious Man, a Modern World, of which Playtime was screened as a part. Just as Keaton’s deadpan face mirrored (or absorbed) our disorientation with modernity and its constructs – a falling house, a slowly descending cannon – Hulot looks around child-like at a depressingly adult society. One scene has Hulot at the end of a ridiculously long corridor, told to wait for the gentleman coming to greet him. The man starts as a speck in the distance, his shoes loud on the floor, taking a full 30 seconds to reach Hulot. 30 seconds in a film is a long time for nothing much to happen. And it’s hilarious.
This is the way the first hour proceeds, and it becomes slightly tedious at points. But this is all needed to set-up the concluding half: the night, for this is the true playtime to which the title refers. Set at the grand opening of a new hotel, the Royal Garden, the rigid architecture that characterised the first hour is unfinished and shaky. Tiles stick to waiters’ shoes. Giant pillars are in the way of guests. The glass door shatters. What follows is a systematic destruction of the hotel’s dining room, climaxing with Hulot accidentally tearing down the ceiling. Unwittingly, he has defeated the boxed in world of day and brought chaos to the night.
The Royal Garden revelers emerge in the morning and see Paris anew. Gone is the grey palette of yesterday, and broken down are its rigid shapes. In their places are bright balloons, colourful cars and boldly attired workmen. The concluding scene portrays a car roundabout as a carousel, complete with circus music in the background. At one point, everything stops, music and all…until a man tops up his parking meter. The carnival begins again, round and round and round.
Playtime is a story of Man vs Environment. In the end, neither win. Rather, you begin to work with your surroundings differently, seeing a mechanical tree where you once saw a lamppost, or a fun hat where you once saw a traffic cone. It’s exactly what Keaton would do: reappropriating the modern world into elements of play.
And you’ll do it all walking on your toes, as though in constant danger of falling forward, with trousers slightly too short…
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter @OliDavis.
For more info on A Serious Man, a Modern World: Buster Keaton and the Cinema of Today, visit the BFI website here.
Originally published January 8, 2014. Updated November 28, 2022.
