Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Jaques Tati‘s  Playtime at the Berlinale. It was the last night of the 70mm retrospective. In his article “The Death of Hulot,” originally published in Sight & Sound in 1983, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum gave Playtime  its most apt description: “the masterpiece that wrecked his career.” It was the most expensive film ever made in France at the time. Playtime took Tati nine years to complete and he spent a great deal of his own money doing it. He built an enormous set on the outskirts of Paris (dubbed “Tativille”) which took over a hundred workers to construct.

I scribbled down some notes during the screening;

1. Tati is a master of sound design.

Sound effects are rampant and gorgeous in Playtime, from farting chairs to a door that completely insulates sound to a soundtrack with four different languages, most of them incomprehensible.

2. Through Tati we see ourselves.

Tati was growing tired of his Monsieur Hulot character by the time he shot Playtime. He often allows Hulot to be an outsider, like the audience, occasionally invited into the strange and marvelous world. Throughout the film I thought of Tati as a benevolent Kafka, showing how funny our alienated technocratic world can be. He only uses long and medium shots, no close-ups.

He also anticipated cubicles and globalization. This travel agency is particularly ludicrous, but not too far off;

Tom Tykwer showed something similar in his brilliant short film for Deutschland 09 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation. We may not be surrounded by concrete monoliths, but we don’t have any problem getting Starbucks coffee in Saudi Arabia.

3. Movie Posters

What happened to them? The posters for Playtime, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, and Mon Oncle are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Two of them hung in my kitchen for a while before being moved to my office. Just look at this gorgeous thing;

4. Misc

The film moves slowly for a modern audience and is without a strong main character to identify with. As Ebert says “rather than a plot is has a cascade of incidents.” The camera often hangs back, allowing us to scan the meticulously constructed frames for small wonderful details. Many people commented on leaving the theater that they had never watched the whole movie without falling asleep; I was guilty of this with 2001 A Space Odyssey before I saw it in theaters. A wonderful, intelligent, humanitarian film. Drink a little coffee before you see it though.