Europe Endless - France: Playtime (Dir Jacques Tati , 2h4m, 1967)

How to pick a single film to represent France, the nation that arguably birthed the medium of cinema? This has been a question I've had to contend with over the last two months: I've already covered the early career of one of its greatest film-makers, Jean Luc Godard, one of its most famous recent hits in Amelie, and even France's burgeoning animation industry. To try and encapsulate the medium into a review is like climbing Mont Blanc armed with a spoon. A few films could have been here. The 400 Blows (dir Francois Truffaut, 1959), the opening salvo of the French New Wave; Abel Gance's staggering five hour epic, Napoleon (1927), the ultra-cool Le Samouraï (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), the nightmarish Les Diaboliques (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), the unflinching La Haine (dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995). 

I even considered going back to the very birth of cinema, as audiences jump to their feet, backing away from the screen in fear as L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciota (dir. Lumière brothers, 1896) suggests there may be more to cinema than simple reportage, or the rocket-blinded Moon glowers down in the first science fiction movie ever made, Le Voyage dans la Lune (dir. Georges Méliès, 1902). Only one director, though, captures the middle century French experience, in all its absurdity and sweetness. Only one film could be the focus of our current visit to France. 

That man was Jacques Tati, and over his six-film body of work, four of them acting as his iconic alter-ego, Monsieur Hurlot - a statue of him peers from the pier at Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, if one needs any idea of his longevity - the bumbling every-man held a mirror up to the modernising nation, from 1953's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, - essentially later loosely remade by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean's Holiday (dir. Steve Bendelack, 2007) to his final appearance as the character in 1971's Traffic. I could have discussed either of these, or arguably the most famous of the series, 1958's Mon Oncle, by far the most lauded of the lot, and a nigh-silent struggle of one man against the trifecta of modern France's consumerism, mechanisation, and modern architecture - a similar vein appears, in more speculative style in Godard's Alphaville (1965). No. Today we consider M. Hurlot at spectacular scale, a man - a nation perhaps - lost in the glass and concrete and consumer goods and upscale restaurants of modern Paris, as Tati conducts comedy on the scale of a Hollywood epic in Playtime.

At the heart of Playtime is M. Hurlot and the city he finds himself in; yet, this is a Hurlot film in which all six-foot-three of the bumbling figure, this benign if chaotic man, is often nowhere to be seen, By the 1960s, Tati was exhausted from playing the character as protagonist, and instead, for much of Playtime, he is either absent, or one among many figures, only exacerbated by the colossal scale of the 70mm film, then otherwise reserved for epics like Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia, and the cinematography by Jean Badal and Andréas Winding. In several sequences, such as his introduction, traversing through an office block in search of a man who he is to meet - with the entire film eschewing close-ups, one has to peer, to search for the figure of Hurlot, as he wanders between cubicles, stumbles into lifts, slips on floors, and in one memorable sequence, must navigate a labyrinth of glass rooms to meet the person he was looking for, only to find he has found their reflection! This is not to mention the pinpoint usage of sound, a painstaking process that took nine months to edit together in post-production. 

Against Hurlot, and the American tourists he eventually befriends, led by Barbara (Dennek), is the city. The scale of the location is at points dizzying, a colossal manifestation of the urbanisation of Paris, using, rather than a real section of the city, a purpose-built location that took two years, a hundred men, a road being built to set, a power station, and, according to some, fifteen thousand square metres, to build. This, an expense largely footed by Tati that would leave him nigh-destitute, having to sell off the rights for his first three films, and meant that production would often grind to a halt as Tati struggled for money, may seem madness. Until the film starts playing and the need for this tremendously expensive "co-star" for Hurlot all begins to make sense, Tati's purpose-built sets taking on the role of a character all of their own, the immaculately choreographed introduction of the tourists, of visitors to the office block, and the trade fair sequence that follows, all moving on grids, quasi-robotically, against which Hurlot stumbles or wanders, unrestrained. The old Paris is ignored, only seen reflected in windows, the spectres of the old city left in the past against the forward march of modernity. 

This is not a place on a human scale; we later see Hurlot visit a friend in a sequence entirely shot from outside their apartment, the action framed by huge floor to ceiling glass windows, where the camera is at once voyeur and comic, the action in each flat reacted to by its neighbour. Not a word is uttered because no words are necessary. Everything but Hurlot is rigid, mechanical, from the consumer goods he finds himself among to the people he stumbles around, and even he is often lost in it. Even when the film reaches its final third, in the increasingly unrestrained "Royal Gardens" sequence, in which the film breaks from its staid, square movements to dance and explore the restaurant, rather than the glass and steel of the city around them. It is where the film finally seems to catch up with M. Hurlot, and to escape, in its final, charming sequences, the restraints of day-to-day life. 

And then the figure of Tati's everyman is gone, lost in the crowds of an artificial city, that nearly bankrupted the filmmaker. Nothing now stands of its sets, but the film remains, one that Tati hoped would play in cinemas forever, and acts as perhaps the definitive document of 1960s Paris, even in this exaggerated and stage-like form. Playtime is not just one of France's greatest film makers working on a scale as dizzying at its choreography, but a film about the modern world and how we relate to it. 

Rating: Must See

Playtime is available on BluRay from Criterion and on streaming from Apple TV

Next week, and next month, to Eastern Europe, beginning with Andrzej Wajda's post-war drama, dominated by the great Zbigniew Cybulski in Ashes and Diamonds.