Playtime
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For the activity period for children, see Recess.
| Playtime | |
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| Directed by | Jacques Tati |
| Produced by | Bernard Maurice René Silvera |
| Written by | Jacques Tati |
| Starring | Jacques Tati |
| Music by | James Campbell |
| Distributed by | Criterion Collection (region 1 DVD) BFI (region 2 DVD) |
| Release date(s) |  December 16, 1967 June 27, 1973 |
| Running time | 155 min. (original French cut) 103 min. (first U.S. release) 108 min. (unrestored and cut VHS version) 126 min. (restored 70 mm version) |
| Country | France |
| Language | French, English, German |
| Preceded by | Mon Oncle |
| Followed by | Trafic |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Playtime is French director Jacques Tati's fourth major film, shot between 1964 and 1967 and released in 1967. Tati plays Monsieur Hulot, a comic character who appears in several of Tati's films. In Playtime, however, there are no real main characters and Hulot is often just a small part of the events on the screen. Playtime is notable for its enormous set, built specially for the film, and for Tati's trademark use of subtle, yet complex visual comedy supported by creative sound effects, with dialogue frequently reduced to the level of background noise.
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[edit] Synopsis
Playtime is structured in six sequences linked by two characters who keep bumping into each other in the course of the story: Barbara, a young American tourist visiting Paris, and M. Hulot, who has a meeting with someone important. The sequences are as follows:
- The airport: a group of American tourists arrive at Orly and discover a futuristic Paris made of cold, impersonal glass and steel buildings.
- The offices: M. Hulot arrives for an important meeting but gets lost in a maze of offices and ends up in an exhibition.
- The exhibition of inventions: M. Hulot and the American tourists see new inventions including a silent door and a brush with headlights.
- The apartments with glass walls: as night falls, Mr. Hulot meets an old friend who invites him to his ultra-modern flat.
- The Royal Garden: having escaped his friend, Mr. Hulot finds himself at the inauguration of a new restaurant with the American tourists. However, the building work has hardly finished and there are various problems.
- The carousel of cars: in the midst of a car ballet, the tourists' coach returns to the airport.
[edit] Themes
In Playtime, Tati's character, M. Hulot, and a group of American tourists lose themselves in a futuristic glass and steel Paris, where only human nature and a few hints of old Paris briefly breathe life into the city. New technologies, billed as conveniences, are represented as merely complicating life, an interference to natural human interaction.
[edit] Production
The film is famous for its enormous, specially constructed set and background stage, known as 'Tativille', which cost enormous sums to build and maintain. The set required 100 construction workers to build it, and its very own power plant to function. Storms, budget crises, and other disasters stretched the shooting schedule to three years. Budget overruns forced Tati to take out large loans and personal overdrafts to cover ever-increasing production costs.
As Playtime depended greatly on visual comedy and sound effects, Tati chose to shoot the film on the high-resolution 70mm film format, together with a complicated (for the day) stereophonic soundtrack.
[edit] Reception
On its original French release, Playtime was acclaimed by critics. However, it was commercially unsuccessful, failing to earn back a significant portion of its production costs. One reason may have been Tati's insistence that film be limited to those theaters equipped with 70-mm projectors and special stereo speakers (he refused to provide a 35-mm version for smaller theaters).
Results were the same upon the film's eventual release in the U.S. in 1973 (even though it had finally been converted to a 35mm format at the insistence of U.S. distributors and edited down to 103 minutes). Though Vincent Canby of the New York Times called Playtime "Tati's most brilliant film", it was no more a commercial success in the U.S. than in France. Debts incurred as a result of the film's cost overruns eventually forced Tati to file for bankruptcy.
Despite its disastrous financial failure, Playtime is regarded as a great achievement by many critics, who have noted its subtlety and complexity: it is not easily absorbed at one sitting. François Truffaut wrote that Playtime was "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently".[citation needed] British critic Gilbert Adair has noted that the film has be viewed "several times, each from a different seat in the auditorium" in order to view the many small, tightly-choreographed sight gags by several different actors, sometimes displayed nearly simultaneously on the huge 70mm screen. Nor is the humor restricted to human behavior alone - it has been noted that Tati is perhaps the only director to ever generate laughter from the mundane hum of a neon sign.
[edit] Cast
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[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Playtime at the Internet Movie Database
- Details about distribution, the 2003 70mm restoration and historical data
- Criterion Collection essay by Kent Jones
- DVDTalk review of the 2006 Criterion DVD, and comparison with the 2001 version
| Jacques Tati |
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Gai dimanche (1935) • School for Postmen (1947) • Jour de fête (1949) • Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) • Mon Oncle (1958) • Playtime (1967) • Trafic (1971) • Parade (1974) |
| Preceded by Mon Oncle |
The Criterion Collection 112 |
Succeeded by Big Deal on Madonna Street |
