Playtime review: a masterpiece of world cinema

Viewed from certain angles, Playtime ought to have made for a roaring disaster and the end of Jacques Tati’s career. It took three years to make. Tati built an entire city to contain the action and elected to shoot on prohibitively expensive 70mm stock. This is the sort of indulgence you expect for a biblical epic, not a comedy with only limited appeal outside France.

To add zeitgeist trauma to the accusations of over-indulgence, the film managed to arrive during the heady revolutionary spring of 1968. Who wanted a big, leisurely film expressing caution about the future, when we all were rushing headlong towards new dawns. The film was indifferently reviewed and the great man never again got to play with such a large budget.

Happily, Playtime has had a very busy afterlife. A treat for restoration buffs, the picture has been dragged out at various festivals and is now seen as one of the masterpieces of world cinema. How could people have ever thought otherwise? Nothing from its era has such a firm grasp on the dehumanising iciness of the modernist experiment. In that sense it looks like a perfect bookend to the golden period that kicked off with Jour de Fête in 1949 and ended with this grand experiment.

The earlier film found Tati's postman cycling around an idyllic version of post-war France. Playtime sees the director's Mr Hulot joining an array of visitors in a cold, uninviting city cut from rectilinear slabs of glass and stone. They are linked by a taste for non-verbal comedy and an ability to fill every second with remarkable incident.

Alas, the reissue is not the restored 70 mm print, but this remains a film that demands to be seen in the cinema.