Sunday, December 20: So PlayTime is up next on my blog. This is another one of those monumental titles that come around every so often where I recognize my responsibility to step back, take notice of the magnitude of the film and give my next post adequate time to gestate, breath and grow into a tribute worthy of the object of my contemplation. My plan is to spend a fair amount of time watching, studying and thinking about this film over the course of this week leading up to Christmas Day, entering a few thoughts at various intervals along the way, at which point I think I will have written enough to feel satisfied that I've covered PlayTime with due respect. This is not a movie to just sit down and watch once or even twice, then rattle off a few paragraphs explaining what one thinks is so great about it, or overhyped, or problematic, or legendary, or whatever else one might have to say based on a relatively recent first impression or otherwise shallow acquaintance with Jacques Tati's magnum opus. No, this is a serious piece of work, though it's also hilarious and baffling and ornate and meticulous and challenging and alienating and arduous and adorable at different times (and sometimes it hits those same contradictory notes, simultaneously.) I question those who claim to love it, as well as those who dismiss it, with what seems to me a premature verdict. PlayTime isn't just a movie, it's a cosmos to be entered into and inhabited for a while, over the course of a lifetime even. It's a world constructed for a few years in the mid-1960s on a big hillside set on the outskirts of Paris, a stage upon which the notions and illusions about the significance of interactions that people have with each other in the roles we respectively inhabit in our lives - even when those roles are so ephemeral, transient and anonymous as to functionally reduce us to cardboard cutouts of an actual human being. It's a three-dimensional canvas occupied by ciphers figuratively twiddling their thumbs over the course of a busy day, urgently spent doing nothing particularly important but getting us from one moment of life to the next, all conceived and illustrated by a genius named Jacques Tati who temporarily brought the scenes to life, capturing them on big fat generous slabs of 70mm celluloid so that current and future generations could come to grips with the truth that such a visionary once lived and walked among us.
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Saturday, December 26: ... Well, so much for that idea. I had the best of intentions, but all the demands and distractions of holiday preparation that occurred between the time I wrote that paragraph and now got in the way of me actually doing any writing on this blog. PlayTime has been in a steady rotation over the course of the past week. I've watched it through on multiple occasions (not always with my full attention) on both of my TVs, most of it on my smartphone (where I've been focusing on how well the visual humor comes across on an ultra-small monitor), and the first hour (basically, all of the airport and office scenes) on a big screen (approx. 10 feet wide) during a lunch break at work, where we have a nice projector system that nobody was using at the time. I've listened to the PlayTime audio track while driving around in my car, now that the film is available for streaming through Criterion's Hulu channel. The early portion of the movie was the focus of our attention yesterday as my family gathered for our Christmas celebration and I left it on in the background while we opened our Christmas gifts. Here's proof:
In short, I've spent enough time over these past six days sitting in various chairs, watching this marvelous medley of choreographed image and sound to feel just a bit self-conscious when the urge arises to chuckle at the parody of passive home media consumers captured in the image above. As it turns out, I'm merely one of them. That is my niche in Tati's world.
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Sunday, December 27: PlayTime is commonly regarded as Tati's howl of protest, or perhaps lament, at the increasing homogenization, streamlining and efficiency of modern life. I don't regard the film as that strong of a dissenting note; his stance is more that of the bemused observer who draws our attention to things we might overlook, than a strident critic of progress he'd like to stop in its tracks or reverse, if possible. It's clear to him, and to us, that the cultural shift that favors the aesthetics of plate glass, stainless steel and electronic gadgetry has its downside - primarily, that things never function quite as neatly as we're led to believe in the sales pitch, and that there's always going to be an inherent messiness, a random element of unpredictability and unpreventable errors, that will cause the system to break down. Tati doesn't regret this, and neither should we. There's a lot of ironic humor and entertainment to be enjoyed as we observe the stumblings and mishaps of others. We ourselves are also kept humble, or at least should be, if we take PlayTime's message to heart, when it's our turn to either foul something up, or suffer the consequences and frustrations that emanate from the mistakes of others. In my mind, this is a rather compassionate and genteel form of satire that Tati advances here - there really aren't any villains, hypocrites or scoundrels to be found in this film, or in any of his other works. To be sure, those who reside at the top of the various pyramids of bureaucracy and power are the most ripe for lampooning, but that's just the way great humor works. I don't see that Tati has any compelling grudge that he's nurturing, nor is he trying to settle a score. His world (and ours) was changing and he was simply (or rather, quite complicatedly) sharing with his viewers a few notes he took as he watched what was happening around him.
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Monday, December 28: After reading quite a bit (more than is probably helpful to me) over the past week about this film, I might as well forget about trying to write the be-all, end-all review of PlayTime here on my blog. There are several others who have, in their own way, beaten me to the punch in that regard. For starters, I have to tip my hat to the legendary Roger Ebert, who very capably captures the film's sui generis characteristics in his opening paragraph:
...one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth. Even Mr. Hulot, Tati's alter ego, seems to be wandering through it by accident. Instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation. It occupies no genre and does not create a new one. It is a filmmaker showing us how his mind processes the world around him.And then there's this monumental masterpiece of the blogger's craft, by none other than Matthew Dessem, whose (now mostly dormant) site The Criterion Contraption I've cited on numerous occasions as one of the chief inspirations of my own blogging efforts. I won't quote him here, simply because the whole write-up is so good that you need to just read it for yourself. Matthew does such an outstanding job of breaking down a few key scenes and summarizing Tati's brilliance in constructing the film that I'm rather persuaded that any attempt on my part to do the same thing would be a stale recycling and futile imitation unworthy of either my time or yours.
Ed Howard at Only the Cinema can always be counted on to drill straight into the heart of what makes a film great, and his succinct two-paragraph essay (accompanied by a generous bundle of memory-triggering screen caps) easily lived up to my expectations.
Noel Vera's Critic After Dark blog is a new discovery for me, but this essay goes on at some length to establish the cinematic connection with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an apt though not so obvious comparison if you just go by the films' respective reputations, surface themes and appearances.
For those who enjoy mingling their cinephilia with social media, my recently acquired Facebook friend Ingrid Hoeben hosts a couple of Tati-themed groups: Jacques Tati's Playtime is specifically dedicated to the film, and it's a great place to gather impressions from other fans. More generally, a group with the cumbersome title I'd like to be part of the Mr. Hulot universe, even as a cardboard cut out solicits input (and provides wonderful links) to all things Tati. Both of the groups are closed, but if you can demonstrate your Hulot bona fides, I'm sure that Ingrid will be happy to allow you into the playground she's lovingly constructed.
To wrap up this long-delayed entry, I'm going to echo the wisdom of Dr. Svet Atanasov, my supreme guru of hi-def discernment, who had this to say in his review of the 2009 Blu-ray release (which I declare has been definitively superseded by last year's deluxe box set reissue, making all previous editions practically obsolete, since this film simply demands to be seen on the largest screen in the highest resolution possible, end of discussion):
I do not wish to discuss PlayTime's message; this would be inappropriate. I believe that attempting to explain how to deconstruct PlayTime would only spoil its magic. One must experience the confusion, amusement and awe Tati's vision of the future usually causes unprepared. Then, in order to truly grasp PlayTime, one must see it again.So I won't bother to provide an over-arching theory of the film's meandering progression from airport to office building to trade exhibition to ultra-modern apartment block to fancy hotel to swinging nightclub to all night diner to bus back to the airport (fading to black in a potentially infinite loop, since the word FIN never appears on the screen), nor will I provide a comprehensive catalog of my favorite characters (including, but not limited to, the stubby custodian, the diminutive President, the perpetually distracted doormen at the office block and the Royal Garden, the prematurely furious German vendor of silently slamming doors, the various fake Hulots that pop up in ways that serve as precursors to The Busy World of Richard Scarry and Where's Waldo?, that rambunctious American glad-hander quoted at the top of this essay, the assortment of poised and beautiful women who reflect mid-60s French couture with such striking elegance as they stride so confidently from one scene to the next under Tati's impeccable direction, or the sweet old floral vendor who serves as the last vestige of Old Paris.) I will give special mention to Henri Piccoli (father of Michel, who starred in Contempt and a few other noteworthy Criterion titles) who played the Important Man (with a busted nose after he ran into a glass door) and the inimitable John Abbey, who played the role of Mr. Lacs with such confident, fastidious swagger. Abbey's face was so recognizable, but it took me a bit of research to learn that he was the same guy who starred in William Klein's Mr. Freedom. That's a revelation to me, and I will probably continue to ruminate on the significance of those two performances, how they relate to each other, well after I'm done writing here.
And finally, there's Barbara, the pretty young woman who receives fonder attention than any other character on the screen. Though never made the focus of any adoringly crafted close-ups (but then, neither was anyone else), she's always framed nicely and allowed to enter the prime real estate on screen whenever it's her turn to appear in a scene. She's the only character who can be tracked from the beginning to the end of the film, even though several of them disappear and resurface at surprising points along the way, and I know that many of PlayTime's fans were easily won over by her gracious smile and cheerful demeanor in the midst of so much hubbub and, eventually, chaos. In response to the question "What's your most joyful scene/sequence from Tati's PlayTime?" that Ingrid Hoeben posted in her Facebook group dedicated to the film, I wrote the following:
While there are many hilarious sequences scattered throughout the film, in retrospect I think the most joyful scene is when Hulot and Barbara enjoy the experience of dancing together. It's the moment of communion, the spiritual high point of the film that lasts probably less than a minute. But it's a peak of quiet transcendence to which the action builds and then gracefully descends until fate decrees that they must part and go their separate ways.I was disappointed to read that she and the film's original script writer had a less than optimal experience in making the film, as disclosed in this Guardian article from 2003, a brief memoir written by Peter Lennon, whom Tati hired to help with the dialog. His slightly bitter recollections are a sobering reminder that, for all the brilliance we see unfolding before us, PlayTime was also in large part a disastrous flop that brought the director and several of his backers to financial ruin. The film's fate can't be entirely overlooked, or condescendingly downplayed as being too sublime for original audiences to grasp or fully appreciate. Tati asks a lot of his viewers, and for those who work through the initial difficulties of reorienting to this kind of filmmaking, a bounty of dividends awaits. But many will struggle stick with it, and I can't entirely blame them, especially if they can't see the movie in its original big screen environment. It's tempting to speculate how the film (and Tati's subsequent career) might have played out if he hadn't proven to be such an obsessive and perfectionist auteur. Perhaps with some savvy management and Tati's consent to craft narratives that played more adroitly to popular tastes in a crowd pleasing manner a la Charlie Chaplin, a more commercially viable route of expression could have been settled upon, where we'd now have a dozen or more marvelous and charming feature length films of his to enjoy. Or maybe he would have settled into the mediocrity of being a fondly remembered character actor from a bygone era, rather than the enigmatic, elusive genius who meticulously crafted a small handful of films his way. Especially this one, such an inimitable and endlessly rewatchable masterpiece, the kind of film that I'm certain will never be made this way ever again.
Next: Weekend