Playtime
1968 Directed by Jacques Tati
Synopsis
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime, a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
Popular reviews
More-
What a fucking mess. What a beautiful fucking mess. Chaos and adventure reign. Nothing like a film that completely seduces you after a string of previous films failings that do naught to jolly your rodgers. I did not expect this. This is my first Jacques Tati film, poppin' cherries all over the place. With this ambitious paragon he goes straight onto the director to-do list and flies right into the shortlist. It is very sad to read of the debt and trials that he had to go through to get this made, and had to continue through for a decade after. I for one welcome our new Tativille overlords. I was yawning and thinking of counting sheep before I watched…
-
Playtime is like a Richard Scarry or Where's Wally? book in very elegant, moving form.
There is so much to take in, there are so many tiny events in every scene, that I don't for a minute doubt the other reviewers here who say how spectacular this film is on this big screen.
But no matter whether you see it on a TV or in the cinema, there is no equivalent of being able to stare at a huge illustration for ten minutes until you've taken it all in - at least not without substantially spoiling the experience of this as a film by endless freeze-framing.
Its feeling of so much happening, of almost too much going on in front… -
Modernity as chaos - life interfering with people, and vice versa. A hundred little spiderweb cracks in the facade, each crack inching the whole ever closer to total collapse.
And yet, people carry on, ignore it, make the best, do what they can. Refusal to capitulate, willingness to be overwhelmed and float along inside the enormity. Pessimism and optimism. A beautiful and awe-inspiring construction - the humanity inside the monstrous teeming caverns of Now. Holy shit, what a film.
-
If ever I were to finally make a Letterboxd list of perfect movies, this would definitely been on there. Seeing it in 70mm (and sitting in the third row), I realized just how masterfully Tati uses the entirety of the screen's space to create a fully realized world from fully artificial ingredients. This isn't TV-ready "storytelling," but genius-level sight gags and visual compositions on multiple planes and from all corners of the screen. See it on the biggest screen you can find if you're lucky enough to live near a showing.
-
I was shaving my legs while watching this film but it was such a fucking good movie that I couldn't take my eyes off the screen and now my legs still aren't shaved. I'm going to have a tough time making friends at the beach.
-
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques, where have you been all my life? If there's one thing I love, it's the perfect meshing of broad and silly comedy with sharper and subtler satirical wit. It would be perhaps a tad hyperbolic of me to say there's a gag per frame here, but I laughed so constantly it certainly felt that way. Not in a long time have I been so physically drained by a comedy, and it's really great to have it all backed up with some insightful points on the commercialisation of human existence. Refreshing too to have a film so confident in its own sense of humour that it doesn't even bother to have much at all in the way of narrative. Can't wait to see it again. And again, and again, and again.
Recent reviews
More-
Modernity as chaos - life interfering with people, and vice versa. A hundred little spiderweb cracks in the facade, each crack inching the whole ever closer to total collapse.
And yet, people carry on, ignore it, make the best, do what they can. Refusal to capitulate, willingness to be overwhelmed and float along inside the enormity. Pessimism and optimism. A beautiful and awe-inspiring construction - the humanity inside the monstrous teeming caverns of Now. Holy shit, what a film.
-
Let's go visit Paris shall we? Ok. What shall we visit during our trip, how about the La Tour Eiffel? No, too boring. The Champs-Élysées? Definitely not. The Sacré-Coeur? Still too boring, you know what, why don't we observe the rapid modernisation and Americanisation of the city? Okay yeah, sounds fun.
Playtime is just a lot of fun. Over the course of the film Monsieur Hulot travels about Paris with a constant perplexity as he attends appointments and gets dragged around the city by old friends, occasionally bumping into a group of tourists. It is a rather simple story but it beautifully, and hilariously, portrays the confusion and claustrophobia of a man lost in today's world of technology and and…
-
What a fucking mess. What a beautiful fucking mess. Chaos and adventure reign. Nothing like a film that completely seduces you after a string of previous films failings that do naught to jolly your rodgers. I did not expect this. This is my first Jacques Tati film, poppin' cherries all over the place. With this ambitious paragon he goes straight onto the director to-do list and flies right into the shortlist. It is very sad to read of the debt and trials that he had to go through to get this made, and had to continue through for a decade after. I for one welcome our new Tativille overlords. I was yawning and thinking of counting sheep before I watched…
-
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiiiiinggggg
-
Just for me.
-
This really wasn't anything like I was expecting. I'm definitely going to have to re-visit it multiple times to take in everything that happened throughout.
Admittedly I wasn't really digging it at first; I hadn't read anything about it before watching and was quite taken back by how different and ambitious it is but by the start of the restaurant scene I was completely won over by its charm.
It's a testament to how well made it is that a film like this actually works. It doesn't really have a central character for the large stretches, it has very little important dialogue and it doesn't have a straight forward narrative. Despite this it all fits together into a wonderful package…
-
I was shaving my legs while watching this film but it was such a fucking good movie that I couldn't take my eyes off the screen and now my legs still aren't shaved. I'm going to have a tough time making friends at the beach.
-
I didn’t expect it to be so quiet, and yet it’s very musical as well. I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s almost like a silent film, all mime movements and visual gags. But it’s also completely rooted in mid-century modernity. I loved it. It’s delightful.
-
On this date it was part of an unusual double bill at the National Gallery of Art with Orson Welles's THE TRIAL.