Play Time
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| Play Time | |
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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 |
| Release date(s) |  December 16, 1967 June 27, 1973 |
| Running time | 155 Min Director's Cut US 103 Min 108 Min (unrestored and cut) 126 Min (restored version) |
| Country | France |
| Language | French, English, German |
| Preceded by | Mon Oncle |
| Followed by | Trafic |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Play Time is French director Jacques Tati's fourth major film and generally considered his masterpiece. It was shot in 1964 through 1967 and released in 1967. Tati plays Monsieur Hulot, a comic character who had appeared in several of Tati's films. Tati had grown tired of playing Hulot, and in Play Time, Hulot is often just a small part of the events on the screen. Shot in 70mm, Play Time is notable for its enormous set, which Tati had 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] Themes
In Play Time, Tati's character, M. Hulot, and a group of American tourists try to navigate a futuristic Paris made of glass and steel highrises, concrete roads and modern, plastic furnishings. Only the irrepressible nonconformity of human nature and people's love for beauty breathe life into the sterile urban environment. Modern industrial technologies, billed as conveniences, are represented as merely complicating life and an interference to natural human interaction.
[edit] Synopsis
Play Time 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 visiting Paris with a tour group of American women, and M. Hulot, who has an important meeting with a man whom he keeps missing. The sequences are as follows:
- The airport: the American tour group arrives at Orly Airport. The viewer notices many humorous details of human behavior among people at the airport.
- The offices: M. Hulot arrives at one of the glass and steel buildings for an important meeting, but gets lost in a maze of offices and ends up wandering about in a trade exhibition of household gadgets.
- The trade exhibition: M. Hulot and the American tourists see new devices including a door that slams "in golden silence" and a broom with headlights.
- The apartments with glass walls: as night falls, M. Hulot meets an old friend who invites him to his sparsely furnished, ultra-modern flat. This sequence is filmed entirely from the street, observing Hulot's visit through the uncurtained plate glass window.
- The Royal Garden: This sequence takes up almost the entire second half of the film. Having escaped his friend, M. Hulot coincidentally meets the man whom he had been seeking all day. The man, who lives in one of the adjacent flats, is walking his dog, and now finds himself with the time to meet with Hulot. Hulot then meets another old friend from the Army, who insists they go to a fancy new restaurant. Hulot, the American tourists, and some characters from earlier in the film also show up. However, the restaurant is an architectural disaster, the construction work hasn't finished, there isn't enough food, and the waiters haven't been trained properly. Eventually, Hulot breaks a partition and part of the ceiling, creating a small enclave near the bandstand where the less straitlaced guests enjoy themselves apart from the pretentiousness of the staff and the rest of the guests.
- The carousel of cars: Hulot buys Barbara two small gifts as mementos of Paris. In the midst of a car ballet in a traffic circle, the tourists' bus returns to the airport.
[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 Play Time 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.
To save money, some of the building facades and the interior of the Orly set were actually giant photographs. (The photographs also had the advantage of not reflecting the camera or lights.) The Paris landmarks Barbara sees reflected in the glass door are also photographs. Tati also used life-sized cutout photographs of people to save money on extras. These cutouts are noticeable in some of the cubicles when Hulot overlooks the maze of offices, and in the deep background in some of the shots at ground level from one office building to another.
[edit] Reception
On its original French release, Play Time 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, Play Time 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 Play Time was "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently". British critic Gilbert Adair has noted that the film has to 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 — a gag may revolve around an everyday object or phenomenon such as the mundane hum of a neon sign or the sound of whipped cream squirting out of a can.
[edit] Style
Tati wanted the film to be in color but look like it was in black and white. The predominant colors are greys, dark-blues, blacks and pastels. Red is used only as an accent color: for example, the flashing light on a switchboard, or the flower on a woman's hat. When it appears, red directs the viewer's attention. It has been said that Tati had one red item in every shot. In addition, there is very little use of green. There are no plants or trees on the set, and almost the only vegetation are the flowers at the street flower-stall, and the plants on the balcony from which we see the Eiffel Tower (the one location shot apart from the road to the airport). Thus, when Barbara appears at the Royal Garden restaurant in an emerald green dress, she visually contrasts not only with all the other patrons but also with the entire physical environment of the film.
Tati detested close-ups, considering them crude, and shot in 70mm so people would be visible from head to toe. He used sound rather than visual cues to direct the audience's attention, and with the large image size, sound could be both high and low in the image as well as left and right.[1] Almost the entire film was dubbed after shooting; the editing process took nine months.
"If Play Time has a plot, it's how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line."[1] This progression is carried out in numerous ways. At the beginning of the film, people walk in straight lines and turn on right angles. Only working-class construction workers (representing Hulot's 'old Paris', celebrated in Mon Oncle) and two music-loving teenagers move in a physically natural way. By the end, the restaurant patrons are dancing wildly to jazz music. Throughout the film, the American tourists are lined up and counted, but Barbara keeps escaping from the group and has to be called back. By the end, she has united the curve and the line (Hulot's gift, a square scarf, is fitted to her round head) and her bus is trapped in a seemingly endless traffic circle that has the atmosphere of a carnival ride.
[edit] Cast
When possible, Tati cast nonprofessionals. He wanted people whose inner essence matched their characters and who could move in the way he wanted.
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[edit] References
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Play Time at the Internet Movie Database
- Details about distribution, the 2003 70mm restoration and historical data
- Criterion Collection essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- DVDTalk review of the 2006 Criterion DVD, and comparison with the 2001 version
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