The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Musical

DIRECTOR

Jacques Tati

WRITER

Jacques Tati

STAR

Jacques Tati

BEFORE

1949 Jour de fête, about a mailman who stops his rounds to enjoy a fête, is Jacques Tati’s first major success.

1953 Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday introduces Tati’s most famous character Monsieur Hulot.

1958 Mon Oncle is Tati’s first color movie, and wins him the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

AFTER

1971 Traffic is Tati’s last Hulot movie.

2010 Sydney Chomet’s The Illusionist is based on an unproduced script by Tati.

French comedian Jacques Tati combined a gift for sight gags and silent comedy with a unique and eccentric cinematic vision. His comic character Monsieur Hulot inspired huge affection.

There is little plot in Playtime, the third Hulot movie, and for many of Tati’s masterpieces. It simply follows the encounters of Hulot and a group of American tourists during a day in Paris. But the Paris in the movie is Tati’s own vision—he created it with a gigantic futuristic set that came to be called “Tativille.”

Lost in Tativille

Tativille is a supermodernist view of the city, with mazes of straight lines and shimmering glass and interchangeable office spaces, in which the bumbling Hulot is lost again and again. In some ways, it is a satire on the dehumanizing effects of the cities of the future. And yet it is also a delightful celebration of the irrepressibility of the human spirit, and that spark of oddness that knocks uniformity a little out of line. At one point, Hulot looks down on a vast floor of identical office cubicles. It looks at first like a nightmare vision. Yet Tati shot this movie on high-definition 70-mm movie, to be seen on a big screen, and if you look very closely, you can see here and there in the cubicles a few other Hulots with their trademark trilby hats. Hulot is not alone.

At the time it opened, Playtime was the most expensive French movie ever made, due mainly to its huge, purpose-built set.

What else to watch: The General (1926) ✵ Modern Times (1936) ✵ Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) ✵ Mon Oncle (1958) ✵ Being John Malkovich (1999)