In praise of Jacques Tati’s Playtime

Mon­sieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) is wait­ing for a job inter­view in a glass office. It looks like he’s trapped in a fish tank. The cam­era is inside with him and the ambi­ent sound is a soft com­put­erised burr which ran­dom­ly shifts in tone every few min­utes. It’s like the sound of a dis­tant wash­ing machine jolt­ing into spin dry and then sud­den­ly slow­ing down again.

Occa­sion­al­ly, the cam­era moves out­side of the office and on to the street, which can be seen through the lay­ered, blue-tint­ed win­dows. The sound is no longer the mech­a­nised burr that Hulot is hear­ing, but the sound of cars, peo­ple and the rustling of the wind. We are hear­ing what the cam­era is hear­ing, not what Hulot is hear­ing. In the 1967 film Play­time, the cam­eras can see and hear. They may not be human, but they are sentient.

It’s rare when we watch a movie to be offered a chance to con­sid­er the space behind the cam­era. This neg­a­tive space – to which it is some­times referred – can be a vital asset which enhances and enrich­es the world we see on screen. It’s easy to take the sta­tus of the cam­era for grant­ed. The cam­era is the cam­era – it films the peo­ple, it relays the sto­ry. But have you ever won­dered why the cam­era is watch­ing a per­son? Does a cam­era even have the abil­i­ty to ​“watch” con­sid­er­ing it’s a dumb machine? Or is it actu­al­ly the direc­tor with his eye to the viewfinder?

Peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly cite the plea­sures of ​“escape” to jus­ti­fy a trip to the cin­e­ma. But this escape is often from hav­ing to think about the nature of what is being watched – an illu­sion, an arti­fi­cial con­struct. For most main­stream pic­tures, film gram­mar is, by and large, self-con­scious­ly invis­i­ble, or at least a sec­ondary con­sid­er­a­tion behind plot, char­ac­ters, jokes, romance, etc. It sug­gests that film­mak­ers, as a reflex, don’t want you to expend brain pow­er on such meta-tex­tu­al tri­fles as edit­ing or cam­era posi­tion or the moti­va­tions behind angles and com­po­si­tions. In Play­time, every shot is a game. Every cre­ative deci­sion has been exe­cut­ed which such immac­u­late pre­ci­sion and is so rich with detail that it can send the mind into parox­ysms of pleasure.

The film is about a man arriv­ing in Paris at the same time as a group of female Amer­i­can tourists. The man bumps into the tourists a few times, wan­ders around and meets some peo­ple, and then vis­its a new­ly opened restau­rant. When the sun ris­es the next day, he buys one of the tourists a scarf as a roman­tic ges­ture. For my mon­ey it is the great­est film ever made.

Yet, this is a banal and mean­ing­less procla­ma­tion – one with­out even the slight­est hint of grav­i­tas. Yet my unwa­ver­ing love of this movie stems from the idea that it remains a mys­tery to me, and prob­a­bly always will do. Not a com­plete mys­tery, but there’s some­thing ineluctably alien about it. If feels like the mono­lith out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have no idea where it came from but am glad that some high­er state of being exists in the uni­verse to place it out there, on the landscape.

Tati’s bound­ing hay­seed M Hulot is, in this film, alien­at­ed from his imme­di­ate sur­round­ings – a loom­ing, glass and steel ren­di­tion of Paris which has put paid to the for-grant­ed right to per­son­al pri­va­cy. The view­er too is placed at a remove from the film. Yet the film nev­er evokes a sense of dis­af­fec­tion: Hulot nev­er looks up at one of these land­scape-blight­ing mon­strosi­ties, shakes his fists to the sky and curs­es its eyes. There’s the love­ly sen­ti­ment that we can’t, don’t and won’t judge or audit our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings, just as we wouldn’t specif­i­cal­ly look at the edit­ing (or maybe let’s call it the archi­tec­ture?) of a movie.

One of my oth­er all-time favourite movies is from the same year, the same coun­try and even tells a sim­i­lar sto­ry: Jacques Demy’s Les Demoi­selles de Rochefort. Both films posit the moviego­ing expe­ri­ence as a whirl­wind lay­over in anoth­er town. There’s no pal­pa­ble tran­scen­dence on offer, no sin­gle-aim task to com­plete or lone char­ac­ter to fol­low. It’s a mesh of missed con­nec­tions and life-alter­ing coin­ci­dences. They are movies about the idea that some­thing not hap­pen­ing or some­thing falling through is dra­mat­i­cal­ly valu­able. Call it the neg­a­tive space of experience.

Play­time offers an over-sized maze of crit­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties and entry points for dis­cus­sion. As an aside, I’ve always thought one of the film’s most purest exam­ples of (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal) poet­ry is that the char­ac­ter of Bar­bara (Ger­man actress Bar­bara Den­nek) nev­er act­ed in a film before and, per cur­rent bio­graph­i­cal resources, nev­er appeared to act in any­thing since. The film is a love sto­ry at heart, and just as Den­nek entered into then swift­ly depart­ed from our col­lec­tive sight-lines, so too did the fic­tion­al Bar­bara depart from Hulot’s life.

The tragedy of the film is that the mechan­ics of their meet­ing is so con­trived, that the like­li­hood of them ever meet­ing again in the future is neg­li­gi­ble. Beyond its mono­lith­ic stature, Play­time is often com­pared to Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, because both films are about unlike­ly things com­ing to be. They are films which depict a frag­ile set of cir­cum­stances that in turn cause a daz­zling chain reac­tion. Hulot and Bar­bara are the pro­found con­nec­tion. They rep­re­sent the infi­nite. They are the Big Bang.

Play­time screens as part of Light Show #1 – a sea­son of films on 35mm curat­ed by MUBI, the ICA and Lit­tle White Lies – on Fri­day 8 Decem­ber at 8.30pm. Book tick­ets here.