PlayTime

Jacques Tati's PlayTime is one of the miracles of cinema. By all rights, this is a work of art that should not exist, as the entire apparatus of commercial filmmaking is designed to prevent such a film. Tati, who staked his fortune on the project, built an enormous functioning city on the outskirts of Paris—paved streets, a power plant, working electricity, operating elevators, demountable towers—and shot the picture in 70mm with post-synchronized sound. The movie stands as an improbable marriage of the visual grammar of silent cinema and the monumental ambitions of the widescreen epic. Such spatial ambition and visual density are, at first, vertiginous and overwhelming; and then, simply, free and inevitable. What first appears as a genial satire of glass-and-steel modernity opens into something transcendent: a vision of human spontaneity and the insurgency of imagination that erupts through the bureaucratic postwar architecture of control and containment. The result, a movie with no real star, no conventional plot, no hierarchy of attention, is the pinnacle of the comedy of democracy. PlayTime demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible, from different seats in the theatre, over the course of a lifetime.

Written by David Telfer.