Playtime

To be shown: 11 June 2007

France 1967
120 minutes
Director: Jacques Tati
Starring: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Georges Montant.

Synopsis

Writer, actor, director and all-round Everyman Jacques Tati created one of cinema's most appealing comedy characters in the hapless, mumbling, slouchy Monsieur Hulot who, like Mr Bean many years later, struggled hopelessly to fit into the modern world.

But after the success of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958),

Tati started to tire of his slapstick screen persona, and started to develop a new, democratic kind of cinema starring ‘everybody'. In Playtime, the entire screen is filled with activity in a masterpiece of visual comedy that takes a delightful sideswipe at the absurdities of modern life. Playtime is an astute comment on urban alienation – particularly on 1960s Paris with its new-found reverence for consumerism rather than romance – yet a comment that is handled with a light and deft comic touch.

Wandering bewildered around a city whose architectural landmarks have been replaced by sterile piles of glass and steel, Monsieur Hulot, like a Gallic Chaplin, wreaks havoc as he tries to keep an appointment with an American official in Paris. In the course of trying, and failing, to pin down his contact, he gets swept along by a group of American tourists which only leads to further chaos.

Thanks to Tati's meticulous approach to film-making it is almost impossible to take in every gag on first viewing. But Playtime is a film that repays close attention to its lovingly-crafted detail – a beautiful, abstract, quirky vision to be enjoyed again and again.