With Playtime
– the 3rd in his 4-film series, following Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, and preceding Trafic –
the mercurial French maverick Jacques Tati created his grandest masterpiece while
also jeopardizing his filmmaking career in the process. In this dazzling and
insanely uncompromising existential and cinematic, Tati concocted a trenchant,
darkly funny and subtly lamenting satire on the absurdist extent of the irrepressible
invasion of technology, urbanization and modernity into our lives. The resulting
work, achieved through elaborately conceived and exorbitantly expensive sets known
as ‘Tativille’ (which caused severe budget overruns and production delays), painted
a dystopian picture of a near-future Paris. The ravishingly photographed film –
shot in muted color palettes and making exquisite use of reflections and visual
deceptions – begins with an extraordinary low-key section with Tati’s indelible
and bemused protagonist, Hulot, trapped in a maze-like, hyper-modernist all-glass
office space trying, in futility, to get in touch with the man (Georges
Montant) he’s come to meet. However that, and a couple of subsequent idiosyncratic
sections apart – wandering across a bizarre Trade Exhibition, and getting
invited into a ludicrously impersonal studio apartment of an old friend – Hulot
became almost a side-character in the fabulous restaurant sequence that comprised
nearly the entire second half. An upscale restaurant, which isn’t really ready
for its opening night, formed the melting pot for all the key characters
introduced in prior sequences – including a wide-eyed tourist (Barbara Dennek) who
wants to capture the real joys of Paris and who Hulot develops a soft spot for –
as it spectacularly falls apart, albeit oblivious to the gregarious and
intoxicated patrons swirling in mad anarchy, and provided for an array of
hilarious and ingenious gags.
p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.
Director: Jacques Tati
Genre: Comedy/Satire/Avant-Garde Film
Language: French
Country: France
No comments:
Post a Comment