The actor, writer and director Jacques Tati (short for Tatischeff, 1907-1982) only made six feature films in his late blooming career as a director. Despite this, he stands at number 46 on Entertainment Weekly’s poll of the world’s greatest directors. His popularity is primarily due to his second and third films, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr Hulot’s Holiday) and his first colour film, Mon Oncle (My Uncle). Part of the appeal of these films is Tati himself who created the original and infuriatingly endearing character of Monsieur Hulot; a role he continued to inhabit in his fourth feature, Playtime, being reissued this week in a restored print.
Shot in 70mm, Playtime was a risky departure from the 1950s films focused on a central character that Tati himself was tiring of. Made throughout the late fifties and most of the 1960s, and completed in 1967, Playtime is a satire on the cult of the new in the 1960s, and a lament for the Paris that we only glimpse through reflections in modern high rises. Hulot himself is a lost soul who weaves in and out of office blocks and tourist buses as they shuttle a group of English speaking ladies around the outskirts of a city that does not resemble Paris. Whatever this tour advertised, the ladies never see Notre Dame, Les Halles or the Louvre.
Tati famously built (and partly financed with his own money) most of the soulless futuristic buildings and streets that comprise the set, making this the most expensive French film made at that time. The set foreshadows the actual outskirts of Paris today, only everything here is clean, glass and white (including the population). The film is worth seeing for this set alone, as the film was France’s Cleopatra, bankrupting Tati (who had to sell his family home) and his production company.
Hulot is no longer the centre of the film, but a marginal character that connects us to the various locations. We watch him trying, unsuccessfully, to get a job interview in a labyrinth-like office tower where he constantly loses the petty bureaucrat who is supposed to be taking him through to the interviewer. When Hulot finally leaves the office building at closing time, he bumps into an old army friend who invites him into his depersonalised new flat, the glass façade of which fronts a busy street.
Hulot spots the bureaucrat from the office but, characteristically, speech is kept to the sounds of intermittent words so that we never hear what they say to one another. Many of the words are English, and Hulot himself appears to speak English, as to the bus loads of tourists, suggesting America’s, and England’s influence on Paris just over twenty years after WWII.
In an hour-long episode, an attractive, English speaking tourist (Barbara Dennek) and Hulot end up at the opening of a new restaurant. It is so new that the builders and electricians are still putting the place together and the waiters are not fully trained.
No one is prepared for the number of overdressed couples that drift in expecting a first-rate nightclub experience and getting what could be the worst restaurant in Paris. The food eventually runs out and the band quits, but a sloshed American millionaire oblivious to the ceiling caving over the dance floor, livens up the party until the sun rises.
The biggest challenge of an episodic film with almost no plot or dialogue is to hold the viewers’ attention, and some will find their patience tested as the satire grows thin and slightly repetitive. But Tati builds his conceit by clever layering, and the images are held slightly longer than normal, but never repeated. The motif of Paris’s famous monuments glimpsed in reflections on the doors of the modern buildings is repeated in the images on a scarf that Hulot purchases for the American tourist as rushes off to the airport. The scarf is like a variation one of those T-Shirts sold today at Piccadilly Circus: My sister went to Paris and all she got out of it was this scarf.
Another lovely detail is the contemporaneous look at ‘Le Drug Store,’ itself a relatively new concept (a pharmacy, grocery, snack bar, newsagent, bar that is open 24/7), brought back from the USA by advertising/PR agency Publicis founder, Marcel Bleustein Blanchet and opened in 1958. After the restaurant closes, Hulot and the remaining revellers head for a branch of Le Drug Store.
Though it just about ended Tati’s career (he made two other, much lower budgeted films), Playtime is considered a masterpiece of the 1960s. It has been restored by Tati’s nephew Jérôme Deschamps for the Jacques Tati season that opens this week at the BFI Southbank and selected art house cinemas.
Joyce Glasser – MT Film reviewer
