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Review: Playtime (1967)

 




Having left his sister’s family at the end of Mon Oncle (1958), a bittersweet coda which I take to symbolise in some way the irretrievable loss of an age of innocence, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s beloved and bumbling alter ego, finds himself amongst other ill-adapted, increasingly mechanised denizens in a near-futuristic Paris - Playtime (1967), Tati’s penultimate full-length feature and arguably his best, involved a constructed set so lavish and enormous that the director was near bankrupt when he finished the film, three years after its start date. The so-called “Tativille” blends the Kafkesque with an impersonal internationalism; the scope of vision is at once grand and restrictive - there is space within a wide interior space and, as evidenced by a now canonical image of Hulot overlooking a grid of office cubicles (this anticipated by at least 20 years the dominance of such design), each inhabitant of the space seems contented and in a way codependent on this inviolable enclosedness.

 

In continuance with Mon Oncle, Playtime revolves on the conflict between modern technology and the emotional well-being of men. Tati does not, however, present such conflict as categorical. Consider the following passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958):

 

     Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human 

     existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose morality is not compensated 

     by, the species’ every-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of 

     things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders 

     each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and 

     transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

 

That work depersonalises the human condition is too self-evident a fact to belie a reversal, hence the equation between the human condition and worldliness (can we imagine going back to the primal stage of no work?) But we also know that this worldliness, in essence a human construct, is prone to capricious changes over time. Freud devotes a whole book, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), on the simple question of why people remain until their death so unhappy and emotionally unfulfilled in society, and the main culprit seems to be the very humanness, which, in Freud’s vocabulary, is conditioned by the repression of Eros. 

 

We may infer that the “unnaturalness” of certain human behaviours is due in a large part to the historical process of acculturation. This is also the principal source and element of most types of humour, including those in Tati’s films. Playtime plays up the modern age’s willing enslavement to work - by work it implies, as mentioned, a distinction from the unprimed, the uncorrupted nature. Bizarreness ensues when the imposed linearity of the system is challenged: the introduction of “curves”, represented by unadepts like Hulot, invariably results in a more vehement reassertion of the angular. This opposition forms the bedrock theme of the majority of Chaplin’s and Keaton’s comedies; in Tati’s Playtime, it is rounded out with a metaphorical note: the scarf that Hulot gives Barbara vis-à-vis the forbidding cityscape of Paris.

 

That ending is a moment of transcendence and, especially if we view it in the context of historical parable, a moment of nostalgia. Following his custom, Tati imbues the film with his unfailing faith in humanity, although an overtone of menace is discernible (modernity seems to signal a nullification of privacy). The second half of the film - the restaurant with its drama-filled opening day - is in my opinion where Tati’s empathy resides, and the most emblematic of the director’s primary outlook of what the future will bring.

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