Tati is a man you must get into. One of the great French filmmakers, he is master of a drolly, wordless and choreographed style of visual unfolding and synchronicity that calls to mind the comic heights of the most brilliant silent films (Busby Berkeley meets Hitchcock?). Last night I saw Playtime, and a month ago Mr. Hulot's Holiday. They share the principal character, M. Hulot played by Tati himself, a bumbling homme moyen that bounces through absurdly contrived situations of social comedy, playing critic to institutions of contemporary French life. In the former film, lighter in subject matter, Hulot takes on the lemmings of summer and their days at the beach. In Playtime he tackles modernity in the urbanscapes of the great capitals -- walking into glass doors, slipping on super-glossy floors, walking long distances down Mies-style hallways, discumbobulated in grid-like repeating labyrinths of office cube farms, and smashing through the shoddily-crafted plasterboard of it all. Tati blasts away at Bauhaus architecture, repeatedly gagging on the huge boxlike concrete blocks called office buildings (in one scene, Hulot passes some travel posters advertising London's Bobbies and a huge box, Cairo's palm trees and a huge box, Germany's fraus and a huge box, etc. before stepping into the street before an identical Parisian huge box).
One truly remarkable feature of this film, which I can't quite connect to the charming-everyman-meets-modern-edifice, is the incredibly rich image. The camera looks through glass windows at the people inside, and you see both the sheen of the glass plate and the sparkle of the office floor. The color and crispness make all other films look out of focus. And Tati uses the whole screen marvelously; if you attend to the left corner, you will that fellow from two scenes ago marching through, checking his watch, even while a whole other gag unfolds on the right corner. I think this film would not possibly work on a small screen -- neither wide enough nor visually crisp enough to reflect the original.
And so I ask you New York, when was the last time Tati's Playtime ran in a 200 seat theater for the public, twice a day, for a week?
Posted by amol at October 14, 2002 03:31 PM