PlayTime 1967 ★★★★★
If you’re beginning with Tati, I recommend avoiding this movie at first, until you’ve watched one or preferably two of his others. Start with “Monsieuer Hulot’s Holiday,” my least favorite of his but the most classic and basic. Then “Mon Oncle,” then “Playtime.”
Watching in that order, you’ll see massive leaps of technical and thematic development between movies. “Playtime” just leaps far beyond “Mon Oncle,” and yet its abstractness, which is one of its major subject matters, may put off potential viewers looking for any kind of plot.
There’s a through-line. It’s American tourists showing up to the Paris airport, touring Paris, and leaving at the end. What Paris do they see? That’s what Tati wants us to think about — an “ultra-modernistic” Paris that, for awhile, only has shadows of the classics sights of the great city, such as the Eiffel Tower. The buildings in “Playtime” are ultra-modernistic — I use that word because the movie does, to describe its atmosphere — and they are all the same. Square gray boxes with square windows. The buildings are no different, according to the travel agency, than any city you can travel to.
My sense is that Tati hates that — the uniformity of modernist architecture, and of all modern life. He makes fun of it when people look for him and find mere lookalikes, men with brown trenchcoats and pipes. The big joke in the movie is that American tourists delight in this ultra-modern Paris full of gray color schemes, traffic, and the same old buildings found everywhere in the world. One of them even says, “hey, they have American stuff here!” Such are American tourists, leaving home to travel to some place that reminds them of home. The movie makes fun of them.
And it delights in them, just as it does the playground of Paris, in spite of the traffic-laden gray streets and boxy buildings. What makes it delightful? The organic and spontaneous transformation of people looking for fun, and by doing so, they create absurdity after absurdity, which Tati delights in. One example is the 45-minute restaurants scene, one of my favorite stretches in film ever. The fat American businessman, looking for a good time there, declares that there will be no business done there. Instead, chaos and dancing and food for all!
The restaurant scene transforms the movie. At first, we wander through the Paris airport, then the office building, then the gadget showcase, and when the restaurant shows up in the movie, it appears to be more of the same: boxy features, straights lines, impractical placement of objects, form over function. The people, however, make it absurd. The waiter who tears his shirt and then has to trade his clothes for all of the other waiter faux pas’s. The bartender who never hits his head on those overhanging boards. The dozens of people dancing. (btw, this is a movie about people in groups, not individuals.)
And then Tati pulls down the building, which lets the American businessman take it over. At that point, when the band leaves out of frustration that the restaurant is falling apart, the organic development takes off, as the American tourist plays the piano and more spontaneity erupts.
People make their environment in spite of their environment being harsh and ugly. Hulot wanders through it all, sometimes appearing from nowhere, and half of the time just receding into the background. His bumbling walk and bent-over posture, the eccentricity of his character, is transferred to the entire restaurant. Out of the uniformity that modernist nonsense forces on us comes the joy of the particular and unimitatable. The people in that restaurant can’t recreate the night they had, and probably nobody can recreate what Tati did in ‘Playtime.”
By the end, while Paris is filled with cars and lines on the road and modernist buildings, it’s become a playground. Tati gives it a melacholic flavor as well, with the Hulot character losing track of the American tourist woman. She leaves with the flowers, and what remains is Paris with the resemblance of those flowers, in the form of the lights surrounding the airport. Tati has left behind the old quaint Paris streets from “Mon Oncle” for a movie that is all modern, which seems anti-human until you look at it as Tati wants you to: absurdity is everywhere, and it’s time for artists, including architects, to encourage Playing around.