Playtime (1967) Review
When you go to a movie theater, what really is the experience that you are seeking? Is it that you are trying to experience equivalently whatever the protagonist in the film does? Is it that you are sitting there, on a comfy seat with a basket of popcorn as a spectator? Is it that you truly are just there, watching some real-life magic going down without participating? If the last one is the most logical to you, then why isn’t watching the crowd getting on with their lives, in the airport, the same as watching a movie? After all, you are watching somebody else doing something that you are likely not a part of. In Playtime, an Italian-French comedy gem made in 1967 (Note the time!), this notion is probably what the director wishes to talk about.
From the first frame until the last, it rarely occurs to audience that they are watching a regular film. The cinematography is often presented as is — as is how we see the world ourselves. You see both the foreground and the background, and you see actions taking place in both.
Now, most films these days utilize close-ups, portrait shots, frame-within-frame shots, camera pans following movements, but only in Playtime could you see that all of these compositions were never meant to capture or focus on just one or two characters. In Playtime, the actions are diverse and decentralized, almost scattered about. The perspective you, as the audience, adopts, is one that you would feel very much real. In the first shot of the film, the screen shows you an old woman who would not stop talking to her husband, while a pair of nun walks from the back to the front of the screen. Two pairs, two people, equal emphasis in terms of the cinematography. Similarly, the scene where Mr. Hulot waits the very important Mr. Office Man to walk down a long-ass corridor just to open a door for him, captures the same essence of this unique style: we focus our attention to both the foreground and background at the same time or intermittently.
Videogamedunkey, a famous Youtuber, game critic and movie critic, reviewed this film (also why I took an interest in the film at all) and literally described the movie (jokingly, of course) “the ultimate twitch stream”.
But the director, Jacques Tati, did not stop there. Of the cinematography, there were more things for him to play around, and he did. Near the end of the film, we see a huge roundabout with only entry but no exit, and the camera slowly zooms out to reveal a worker cleaning the window that we just saw through. He pushes the bottom of the window pane and it became clear that the window can rotate on a horizontal axis, and the upper part of the window rotated in for the man to clean it. The camera goes to the other side and we see the reflection of a tourist bus in it along with the women. As the windows rotate up, the bus seems to drops low, out of the screen, and the sky and the cloud would come into the frame. With this, the women screams and awes. As the window rotates down, the women and the bus goes up back into the frame, and they awes in assurance almost like riding on a roller-coaster in an amusement park.
Sincerely, I do feel that too many words on the cinematography (with my limited English vocabulary, of course) is wasteful. On watching the film I found the most central theme to be of order vs chaos, surprisingly. In the first half, we see skyscrapers, offices, ridiculously complex machines and corporate workers who are “packt like sardines in a tin box”. We see a concierge in a tour office who works his ass off on a office chair, dancing right and left, answering three separate phones and at the same time had to answer questions and take requests. We also see guys who don’t do anything at all, or like the foreman in the nightclub, who holds the handle of a door already broken into pieces, solely for creating an illusion of the existence of the door. People are machines, and they work their ass off in obfuscated places, with confusingly vain tasks and run around busy at all times. We see the same corporate workers go back to their premium apartments that look exactly the same and watch the same television program and even have the same chair. We see that the same skyscraper is used in different posters for different countries and cities. One second you see the Eiffel Tower in the reflection, then you see Buckingham Palace in the reflection, but the doors that reflect them buildings are actually just a block away to each other. It is hard not to say that this 1967 film tapped into the criticism of modern world. It has, intentionally or not, conveyed a message about the modernism, consumerism and loss of uniqueness, through subtle yet unforgettable means.
In clear contrast to this, is the second part of the film, where we see the opening of a nightclub until the next morning. Plot-wise, this serves as the climax of the film, and thematically, I regard it as a rebuttal to the aforementioned modernism. The scenes are always chaotic, in that the mise-en-scène are always very, very crowded all the time; The number of characters on the screen at any moment is significantly more, and in the crowd are numerous familiar faces to the audience and they are doing different things. We see a few sub plot devices such as the crown-shaped chair (which is brilliantly foreshadowed), the Mr. America, the broken door, the unfinished constructions of the nightclub, and the band. All the characters who appeared to have threaded the movie together, have all gathered here again, under various circumstances. Mr. Hulot, who is kind of a leading character, comes in and wrecks havoc. Note that most of them were situated, separately and alone, in the cold, machine-like, modernist settings in the first half of the film. And they were, without exception, confused, dazed and lost to some s marked in color black. There was at first only a French band that knew only one song, and people started dancing. After them, American Jazz band came up and lit up the place. Then, they left, startled by the fallen wooden board from the celling and the sparking, exposed electric wires, but the enthusiasm and the drunkenness of the crowd was not dead. It is here we see people started to enjoy themselves, by giving no fucks about the chaos (or enjoying it) surrounding and continued to have fun. At first, the environment, the machine, the offices, the tours, the buses controlled the people by limiting how they should act in the society. In the nightclub, although the construction was not even finished and the restaurant was utterly chaotic, they had initiative and subsequently they had fun.
Once again I should quote Videogamedunkey: “”Playtime is a film… that you watch together but each one gets a completely different movie.” Truly, that chaotic mise-en-scène and the overwhelming actions by so many actors and actresses could knock you off your head. It is not like normal cinema where you watch one guy triumph; you instead watch a bunch of guy triumphing in their bunches of activities, and in that chaos, my friend, you would find joyous humor and sincere laughs.
