Critics reviews

Tati erected an entire skyscraper outside of Paris to mount this ode to mid-20th century cosmopolis. The result is a silent film that’s not silent at all, a nonverbal story conveyed so lucidly that the few spoken lines and the handful of languages in which they are uttered are virtually irrelevant.

The movie not only presents us with evidence of the alienating effects of the post-war modern world, but also an antidote, through a subtle play of comic and democratic performance. In this regard, Tati's film career evolved from his early work as a mime and performance artist.

Monsieur Hulot, the bumbling and kindly protagonist, is not an agent of violence like Caution. Hulot is a ghost, fascinated yet endlessly rejected by the city's sleek, uncompromising interiors and exteriors. It's not at all a dark film, yet Tati was clever in taking international modernism and 1960s American commercial design at its word; if this was a design for ease and bourgeois leisure, then a Paris saturated *by* that ease must necessarily be a playground, a site of fun.

If there's any justification needed for a series titled "See It Big," there's no better than Tati's masterpiece. A rare combination of high modernism and comedy on a massive scale, it's a film that's actually impossible to catch the entirety of on small screen, with simultaneous gags crammed into every plane of Tati's hyper-composed deep-focus images of what appears to be half the population of Paris, plus (why not?) a few cardboard cutouts.

Playtime, arguably the most ambitious visual comedy ever made, is hardly traditional—and it is certainly not small. Jacques Tati's 1967 masterpiece goes far beyond satirizing modern architecture and technology to create a strangely elated celebration of the way people move through space.

[Tati's] feature films are uniformly superb; "PlayTime," however, is sublime: a laugh-out-loud comedy that, filmed largely in medium shot to showcase Hulot's navigating the maze of modern life, is also a mind-boggling spatial composition.

Full disclosure: for my money Playtime is the greatest film ever made... My unwavering love of this movie stems from the idea that it remains a mystery to me. Not a complete mystery (I hope), but there's something ineluctably otherworldy about it. I have no idea where it came from and no idea where it's going.

Jacques Tati's 1967 film Playtime may elicit muted guffaws, raised eyebrows, jaws dropped in amazement – but belly laughs? Hardly. Tati creates a different kind of comedy – a deadpan kind that's somewhat rarefied and intensely complex, but life-affirming.

The print wasn't pristine but the movie dazzles all the same, a stunning feat of imagination that turned the Siren into a kid at a birthday party, gobbling treats at top speed in fear she wouldn't get to it all in time.

Whereas Tati had always used humor to create character, here he slowly builds through visual and aural gags (sound was a key component of his "silent" comedy) a rich comedic landscape laced with equal quantities of cynicism and warmth.

The colossal architecture of [Tati's] sets suggests a satirical delight in the colossal follies of the International Style (and he makes comic use of what he derides as its deflavorizing, impersonal internationalism), but his delight is mitigated by his recognition that its mechanisms mechanize its dwellers and workers, that its uniformity renders people uniform, that its order both reflects and heightens a bureaucratic blindness that threatens the emotional life.

As an occasional filmmaker myself, I've dabbled in visual comedy, so maybe my admiration for Tati has a flavor slightly different from that of the normal human. Anybody can enjoy a great juggler's show, but another, lesser juggler has perhaps a sharper eye for the truly difficult feats. Of course, just because something is difficult doesn't make it worth doing, so I'm also interested in the motivation behind Tati's fabulous tricks.