Playtime

This is not a movie, it's art captured in film!

Sometimes it's hard to watch and understand films from another time, but Playtime is a completely different concept and worth watching, but if you're expecting the standard "good story" style of 99% films today, you won't find it here, and should probably refrain.

It's a film to be watched many times, like a painting hanging on the wall. Every time you watch it, a different detail will come up, a different story will appear, and every scene is just there to tell you things. It's up to each one to interpret them and they can be as boring, interesting, funny or sad as you want.

It's also a nice movie to watch with other people: each one will laugh and react at different things. It's funny to interact and try to "recreate" the entire action.

Finally, I agree with people saying that it should be watched on a big screen with high quality. There's so much detail in the shots that you will miss a lot if you don't have the right setup. I would say FullHD is the minimum acceptable, along with a big screen.

I comment 2 years after seeing "Playtime" at the Art Institute of Chicago, an event in which the film was presented in its original 70mm format for the first time since its debut. Over the years it had been cropped and recropped for standard prints and video leaving little of the original magic, which is the sheer SCOPE of this visual marvel.

Absolutely amazing sells "Play" short. The picture was so clear and the sequences so thrilling that I dare say this is Tati's Masterpiece. Apparently, he created an entire 1/5th scale city outside Paris and shot over the course of three years to get this honey in the can, and man-o-man, does it show.

This is the kind of film that reminds a viewer just how standardized modern cinematic narrative has become. Tati exists in an alternate plane of recorded consciousness; I walked out of "Play" as if hallucinating, having fully entered his perspective and adopted his suggestions as my own.

This is a film in balance with the nature of cinema itself; if Frank Lloyd Wright was a director, Tati would be his disciple: Tati's cinematic interpretations are in natural proportion to the distinctive elements of film. Visual dominance, sound hyperbarically in support of the image rhythm, help me I'm hallucinating again-thanks Jaques...

Don't miss this one, but don't see it in any other format than a special 70mm screening. Somebody put a screening together!!!

Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) curiously wanders around a high-tech Paris, paralleling a trip with a group of American tourists. Meanwhile, a nightclub/restaurant prepares its opening night, but it is still under construction.

"Playtime" is notable for its enormous set, which Tati had built specially for the film, as well as Tati's trademark use of subtle, yet complex visual comedy supported by creative sound effects; dialogue is frequently reduced to the level of background noise.

The office set anticipated the dominance of office cubicle arrangements by some twenty years. The set was redressed for the trade exhibition sequence. Tati wanted the film to be in color but look like it was filmed in black and white. He succeeded.

This is a great film. With or without the plot, with or without the comedy, it is great on the architecture alone. Few films really capture "architecture" in them, with only one other coming to mind: "Metropolis". That is how rare this film is, being the first of its kind in forty years.

Where 'Mon oncle' was Tati's initial statement on the modern and its collision with the old, here in 'Playtime' he reaches his conclusion. They can unite - there is beauty in the new, as well. Yes, what is new and alienating now, will soon be the old familiar tradition. Everything changes, but the spirit of things remain.

This he manages to show in a series of beautiful scenes, brilliant observations, in a Paris which has been rebuilt to the extent, where the old Frenchman doesn't find his way around it, anymore, and the Eiffel tower can only be found in reflections on shiny glass or steel surfaces of modern buildings.

This is a film language all of its own, and driven to a razor sharp perfection. Through Tati's eyes, we can see exactly what he both worries about and marvels at, and of course we feel the same. The love he does in all his movies show for people, no matter how silly they might be, he also shows the city itself, and its megalomaniac constructions. It's all crazy, he tells us, but isn't it great fun, too? Yes, Jacques, it is, indeed.

Don't see this film on TV. This film was shot on 70 mm and you should see it in the cinema on a LARGE screen. I've seen the film in the cinema first, it was brilliant. Later I saw it on TV, it was mediocre the most. Then I saw it in the cinema again, and again it was brilliant. Why? The quality of this film is in the small details. In some scenes, you just don't know where to look because so much is happening at once. On TV, all these details get lost. DVD won't help! A TV just has way too few pixels! This film relies not on story (there hardly is one), but on inventive and imaginative images. Watch the 70 mm version in the cinema, and enjoy the biggest film this genius ever made, with sometimes subtle, sometime hilarious humor!!!