Frustrated

Jbels,
Playtime is one of my favorites but I understand your frustration. It’s so unlike any other movie that it’s hard to know what framework to use to appreciate it. I’m jealous of your 70MM screening since I’ve only seen it on DVD.

Tati made this movie and eventually sold the rights to his previous movies to finance its completion. It was a box office failure and left him in the poorhouse. Seeing M. Hulot’s Vacation and Mon Oncle help one to appreciate Playtime. The theme is the same as in the first two but it’s carried to the ultimate end in the latter. All three movies are about how we can see humor around us if we just free ourselves from the quick pace of our lives and open our eyes to what happens around us.

Nearly all movies direct our attention expertly from person to person and point of the screen to point of the screen. Tati has done a couple of things in Playtime that run counter to this. He declines to give us a central character to invest ourselves in and he refuses to direct our eye around the screen. In fact, in the first scene in which we see Hulot (or perhaps just someone who looks like him) he wanders onto the screen but we don’t see him until Tati cues us with the loud sound of an umbrella falling – the central point of Tati is made: the world we are in is interesting if we take the time to examine it. Once we hear the umbrella fall, our eyes rivet on Tati as he picks it up and walks offscreen and we’re surprised that we didn’t notice the familiar look of Hulot when he walked to the middle of the screen. Throughout the movie, Tati leaves it up to us to find the humor and to, in essence, form the movie that we take away from the theater in our memories.

Hulot crams the screen with minor amusement until your brain spins from not knowing where to look. It’s a disconcerting feeling but it all serves the central purpose of the movie. You’ll see a recurring gag of Paris’ landmarks reflected in windows or shown on postcards but the tourists never actually seem to get there. While very few of the gags are laugh out loud funny, they all bring a smile to my face. The ending restaurant scene is a madhouse of dozens of carefully orchestrated performances. The only way a person could understand this whole scene is to see it as you did in 70MM and maybe see it two or three times.

Playtime is altogether brilliant in my mind. It’s the masterpiece of a director chasing his dreams to their ultimate conclusion, even to his detriment. It succeeds wildly to me because it ignores film conventions and challenges the viewer to accept it on it’s own terms. It sounds to me like you are in between throwing up your hands in frustration and investigating it more to understand what’s there. I hope you chose the latter but wouldn’t be surprised by anyone who did the former.


http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_rankingorder.htm

I was also ready to bail before the restaurant scene. It was a wonderful piece of choreography, but the movie was sill only mediocre.

Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar, or doesn't.

I can see where you'd be coming from.
For me it was a different experience: it was like a big bag full of toys and chocolates and fortune cookies and stories on pages held together by a loosely tied ribbon and toy instruments and Lego pieces and postcards, and I couldn't have enough of digging into the bag to discover the next thing, and sometimes I'd pull out a handful of different things and I marvelled at sone of them. Strings of meaning came together and fell apart and came together again. A monkey brass band played in the background and everything felt like modelling clay in the hands of a 5 year old on a Sunday afternoon.
It was endlessly fascinating.
But I see how it could feel overwhelming.
I am sure I need to dig in again, it was impossible to take everyting in in one go.
And I've never seen such direction before. I did see good cinematography, good scripts, good dialogue, good soundtrack, good actors and good directors doing good stuff in the middle of all this. But never such direction. I need to watch that interview with Tati to understand a little how it was even possible to coordinate ALL THAT.