Playtime ***** (1967, Jacques Tati) – Classic Movie Review 1662

Newly restored in 4K, co-writer/director Jacques Tati’s perfectionist 1967 comedy classic Playtime gets a UK re-release on 7 November 2014. Shot on 70mm on a huge constructed set of concrete, glass and steel, the film is Tati’s most ambitious project and arguably his most successful artistically. But, sadly, it wasn’t a success at the box office and the film’s financial failure kept Tati in debt for 10 years.

Tati’s labour of love masterpiece is a perfectly orchestrated city symphony bringing back his alter ego character Monsieur Hulot in a series of inspired gags in which he’s mixed up with American tourists on his way to an employment appointment in a nightmarish, crazily futuristic, modernist Paris that has been completely depersonalised and become totally synthetic .

In the story, Monsieur Hulot has a job interview, but before he can worry about impressing his future employers, he’ll need to find them first. Landing up in a reimagined modernist Paris, he has to navigate endless corridors, slippery floors, sinking chairs, sliding doors and misleading reflections in a high-tech corporate labyrinth. There a kind of Kafka-esque organised chaos reigns and Hulot sticks out as an Orwellian misaligned cog in the machinery of modern life.

Bumping into old war comrades and a cute American tourist along the way, Hulot leaves the office block behind and finds himself guest of honour at the opening of Paris’s latest and worst restaurant – an establishment so new that the builders still haven’t left.

Everything hilariously conspires against Hulot, from the new high-rise buildings via the people and the objects he encounters to the cars he rides in. The scenes at the airport and the unfinished restaurant are superbly managed and are shot entirely in the studio in a dazzling feat of technical as well as artistic ingenuity

Playtime is a wildly ambitious epic comedy running 155 minutes (with an intermission and exit music) in 70 mm six-track stereo but the 2002 restored version runs 124 minutes and the original cut American version runs only 108 minutes.

The master of French comedy will be further celebrated through a special season at BFI Southbank taking place between October and November, featuring new restorations of his entire oeuvre. It will screen in the French Film Festival UK this November and in selected cinemas nationwide.

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