(Part of The Complete Jacques Tati)
Distributor: The Criterion Collection
Release Date: October 28, 2014
MSRP: $124.95
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Film: A+ / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: A-
Playtime extrapolates Mon Oncle’s stiflingly impersonal home into a globalized system, a world in which corporate utilitarianism has replaced nationalistic distinction. An early shot gazes down a Parisian street to see only a lane of perfectly spaced office buildings, and soon thereafter Monsieur Hulot, entering one of those buildings to apply for a job, gets lost and opens a door into a similarly ordered boardroom, with look-alike corporate executives receding into the shot’s distance like the slabs of steel and glass they occupy. The Arpels lived in a glass house to parade their personal success, but here the entire world is transparent, all the better to force every worker to keep up appearances.
It’s no coincidence that the unified look of each building equates offices, living quarters, and shops, erasing the boundaries of consumerism even as all the glass walls keep people fundamentally separated. Tati illustrates this barrier with a number of sight gags, such as one man asking another standing two feet away for a light, only for both to have to walk over to a door because it turns out they are on opposite sides of glass. Later, when Monsieur Hulot heads to a friend’s apartment, long shots of the complex frame each unit as a TV screen, peering into the lives of the residents as they stare at the televisions on their own walls, which in turn gives the impression of each family spying on the other.
The sheer scale of the production dwarfs its human characters, but that is the point. Tati emphasizes the impersonality of this world, even using the film’s first act to stage a series of fake-outs involving Hulot look-alikes. The proliferation of tall, overcoated men in hats not only toys with audience desires—and it takes brass to mount a lavishly expensive, 70mm epic and deny the main reason crowds would go to see it—it also highlights the commonality the character is meant to embody, and how his distinctiveness is still possible even among hordes of doppelgängers. The film shows millions of people existing in plain view of each other but craving segmentation (one of the funniest gags involves a silent door showcased at a convention, promising to seal people away from the roar of modernity while still existing within its bowels).
Even more so than Mon Oncle, Playtime portrays Hulot’s relationship to chaos as incidental, as evidenced by the film’s astonishing Royal Gardens sequence, quite possibly the most intricately mounted, revelatory setpiece in movies. Hulot does not even arrive at this newly minted luxury restaurant until things have spiralled out of control—freshly pressed tiles sticking to waiters’ shoes, clothing caught on the hard iron spikes of the crown-shaped chair backs—by which time his destructive mishap, accidentally tearing down an entire section of a wall, is merely punctuation. No matter how many times you watch the film (I’m up to six or seven), this sequence still thrills for its catharsis, gradually undoing the stuffy, class-restrictive rules of the establishment until the dam breaks and people just wander in, creating a new equilibrium in which being interesting and fun is the only criterion for entry into rarefied areas. Made in 1967, the movie preemptively puts forward a utopian vision for the failed May ‘68 uprisings that would break out a year later.
The gradual critical elevation of Playtime has been a sight to behold, though perhaps not that surprising. It is one of cinema’s great balancing acts, using its gargantuan frame to map barely visible gags and its detached perspective to mount one of the most humanistic stories in cinema. It is a reminder of comedy’s unique ability to tap into a collective individualism, in which a group can articulate positivity better than a lone person, but only if that group honors the distinctive voices within it. Completely bucking narrative expectations, Tati doesn’t end his film with the Royal Gardens spectacle but instead after the hungover, blinking emergence into daylight following the revelry. Instead of that leading to a downbeat ending, however, the film starts to see neo-Paris in a different light, its traffic jam in a roundabout turned into a giddy merry-go-round, and the sky glimpsed in a tilted mirror causing tourists to gasp with more pleasure than anything to do with the city they flew to see. The freewheeling interaction of the previous night proves that cities can (and should) be places of great intermingling, and instead of seeking to tear down his vision of a modernized world, Tati merely asks that we keep a sense of ourselves in it.
A/V
The 4K restoration of Playtime has attracted considerable controversy over the dramatic alteration of the film’s color timing, replacing the cold, metallic tones of previous transfers with a warmer, greenish-yellow tint that does not gel as well with the film’s futuristic milieu. While it undeniably takes some time to adjust to the change, I gradually came to love Criterion’s new transfer. Compared to my old stand-alone Blu-Ray, color contrast and textures are considerably sharper, and if the brighter palette no longer purely captures the steely, conformist atmosphere of the film, it instead illustrates the movie’s richer human subtext. The deeper one gets into the movie, the more this new transfer brings out the Hopper-esque tone of the shots, stressing the loneliness of life in a crowded city and replacing the prior visual didacticism with something more ambivalent. Audio continues to be exceptional, the added channel for surround not so much adding depth to Tati’s aural engineering as proving it was there all along.
Extras
Another Terry Jones introduction charmingly goes over the film’s themes (though, beware first-time viewers, it spoils some of the best gags), and selected scene commentaries from Philip Kemp, Jérôme Deschamps, and box set MVP Stéphane Goudet cover parts of the film. “Like Home” is another Goudet essay, and his shortest yet, not even lasting 20 minutes. But the brevity does not preclude Goudet from exhibiting his expected lucidity and evocation of Tati’s complexity in cogent, concise observations. Perhaps it’s because Playtime has by now been dissected to death that he does not feel the need to spend an excess of time potentially repeating others. (Furthermore, the old transfer from which Goudet sources his video footage supports the idea that the film originally looked like the new restoration, and that it was the more recent upgrades that tinkered with the look.)
“Beyond Playtime” is a short documentary with behind-the-scenes footage, upon which a 1967 British TV episode “Tativille” expands considerably, complete with interviews with the director. Rounding out the disc are an interview with Tati’s script supervisor, Sylvette Baudrot, as well as audio excerpts of a post-screening discussion with Tati at the 1972 San Francisco Film Festival, in which the director is in fighting form after being invigorated by the film’s warm reception there and his bitter memories of the film’s costly failure. Tati was nearly 65 at the time, but when he tells the crowd that you can either have the respect of the audience “or the Bank of France,” he sounds like a young radical.
Overall
Jacques Tati’s magnum opus is the centerpiece of both the director’s filmography and Criterion’s box set, and though extras are the same as the previous stand-alone issue, the upgraded audio and video renders the now-OOP disc redundant.