In Playtime, Jacques Tati has constructed yet another world of never-ending mazes and technological monstrosities. This film inhabits a planet of its own. Welcome to Tativille (which cost a fortune to build). Well, if you've seen some of Tati's own productions, you'll know what you are in for. There is no "plot", no "characters" (only one or two have actual names) and no "dialogue" (mostly blurry English) - but it does have world. Most of the time, you'll find yourself busy: just to keep track of what goes on in these medium/long shots takes some effort. A lot goes on, all the time, everywhere (don't forget the blood pressure medication). Playtime is a giant torrent of people, vehicles and eerie noises. This torrent is systematic and perspicuous at first, but towards the end of the film, the order is abolished.
I'm surprised how contemporary Tati's futurist vision feels - Tati could have been the architect of my work place: gray/white/black, steel and glass; endless corridors; every place look like the place next to it, and so on, and so forth. A non-place, a passage, something to travel through, if you have some business there. The people populating Playtime do seem to have "business", at least for a while. But the world of business, errands and intentionality gradually fall apart, and we end up with a joyous and anarchic sense of disintegration.
Mr Hulot - and his umbrella - is the anonymous "hero" of the film (you might recognize him from Mon Oncle). Mr Hulot wreaks havoc. Mr Hulot is hailed by people who seem to know him. Mr Hulot walks from place to place, without seemingly really going anywhere. Do we here him utter any words? Maybe a quiet "yes" or "hello". Mr Hulot is slapstick humor at its classiest.
I know too little about Tati to say anything about the politics about the film. What I know is this: Tati is a far more observant interpreter of the anonymity of modern space than a bunch of conservatives and marxists alike. Like some contemporary critics of modernity, Tati shows us a world in which an airport is hardly distinguishable from a cafe or an office building. Often, it takes some initial work to figure out where the characters are located. Hell - that is an apartment! Wow, it sure looks like .... everything else! Everything looks the same. The diference is that Tati is never whiny. His rendition of modern standardization and technical "progress" never fail to be surprising, moving and disturbing. In Tati's world, humans are never totally immersed in the steel&glass dystopia/utopia; he shows the enormous humorous potential of human reactions of confusion and reverie in the face of escalators, beeping buttons, skyscrapers - and the total indifferent shown by these glorious inventions. Walls are knocked down, doors are bumped into, invisible doors are closed, chairs are messed with, elevators are accidentally boarded, ceilings are ripped apart, floors are destroyed - etc, etc. The interesting thing is that what this surrounding IS will be shown over and over again in a multitude of ways in how people interact with it. Totally indifferent, and yet ---.
I guess Deleuze might have been a fan of this film. Like Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus, Tati places his hopes in disorder, but also in a change of perspective: humans are no longer humans, but a sort of weird appendage to machines. It's just that people are not the slaves of machines. They don't adapt. They don't fit. Nothing fits. The point is that new matches and mismatches emerge all the time, so that new situations appear, but not "situations" in the familiar sense of the word, where a situation has a clear direction. What makes me think of Deleuze (and maybe some marxist situationists, too) is the film's merry purposelessness. For Tati, like for Deleuze, the world is not "going" anywhere. Mr Hulot makes his way through the city - and the city makes its way through Mr Hulot. (If you want to watch a deeply anti-foucaldian film - watch this.) For the first 30 minutes, I thought that Playtime would be a grave attack on urban alienation. Instead, it turned out to be a film about our notorious ways to always inhabit the world, to always make the world our own, no matter how standardized and clinical it appears to be.
Playtime is a mess. But a wonderful one at that. It's one of the most strangely optimistic films I've seen in a long time.
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