Play Time (1967)
Play Time is a French comedy unlike any movie I've ever seen. It is a grand sweeping commentary on modern life (mid 60s in Paris) as well as a carefully choreographed physical comedy. Depending on your approach to watching it, it can be incredibly boring. Done completely in long shots with no real dialogue, it's hard to know what to pay attention to. It took my wife and I four viewings to complete, since we would fall asleep within a half hour of putting it on. And yet we were both totally fascinated by it. It's one of those great works of cinema that I feel entirely unqualified to review. The preceding sentences are the best I can do.
Here, however, is some more learned exposition, attributed to James Layton and gleaned from this criticism site, which appears to borrow heavily from the text of the DVD commentary by British film historian Jack Kemp, and quotes other critics as well:
Shot in 70mm and widescreen, the large format photography displays great detail and depth. Doing away with traditional techniques and scene construction, Tati filmed almost all the film in long shot in vast sets, heavily populated with actors and extras. Film Historian Philip Kemp explains: “Tati invites us to explore the space offered to us, presenting us with the whole screen, generally in long shot and leaving us to let our eyes roam around it and pick up small comic elements or repeated gestures, patterns and shapes, movements copied or frustrated.” There is, at any one moment, many things happening on screen, all intricately planned and executed. Each scene is so densely packed with people, that if you look around you'll always find something funny. It is comedy on a grand scale, that, with subsequent viewings the spectator can always find something different. Playtime presents a more democratic approach to comedy.
Writing upon the film's American release critic Jonathan Rosenbaum commented that “the richness of Playtime is not available to anyone on a single viewing. At best one can discover the richness is present. At worst, the viewer can become so bored by what he doesn't see that he fails to see that a radical change in the language of the cinema is being proposed. The film can seem funny or unfunny, empty or full, lively or dull, beautiful or ugly in one viewing, but it cannot come across in its entirety.” French critic Noël Burch believes that Playtime is “the first in the history of cinema that must be seen, not only several different times, but from several different distances.”
Here, however, is some more learned exposition, attributed to James Layton and gleaned from this criticism site, which appears to borrow heavily from the text of the DVD commentary by British film historian Jack Kemp, and quotes other critics as well:
Shot in 70mm and widescreen, the large format photography displays great detail and depth. Doing away with traditional techniques and scene construction, Tati filmed almost all the film in long shot in vast sets, heavily populated with actors and extras. Film Historian Philip Kemp explains: “Tati invites us to explore the space offered to us, presenting us with the whole screen, generally in long shot and leaving us to let our eyes roam around it and pick up small comic elements or repeated gestures, patterns and shapes, movements copied or frustrated.” There is, at any one moment, many things happening on screen, all intricately planned and executed. Each scene is so densely packed with people, that if you look around you'll always find something funny. It is comedy on a grand scale, that, with subsequent viewings the spectator can always find something different. Playtime presents a more democratic approach to comedy.
Writing upon the film's American release critic Jonathan Rosenbaum commented that “the richness of Playtime is not available to anyone on a single viewing. At best one can discover the richness is present. At worst, the viewer can become so bored by what he doesn't see that he fails to see that a radical change in the language of the cinema is being proposed. The film can seem funny or unfunny, empty or full, lively or dull, beautiful or ugly in one viewing, but it cannot come across in its entirety.” French critic Noël Burch believes that Playtime is “the first in the history of cinema that must be seen, not only several different times, but from several different distances.”