Playtime -- What Makes This Movie Great? (Episode 95)

it's what i think is one of the best movies ever and let me argue why it's jacques tati's 1967 feature film play time let's analyze it and have a ton of fun with it coming up next [Music] playtime is a 1967 movie by the great french director jacques tati a mime turned actor who is a director and stars as major hulo and by now a classic character in cinema and this is the third feature in which major hulo is the main character tati had a massive budget for this as compared to all of his other movies and you get to see him do a lot of wild coordination that you just don't see in almost any movie where he stuffs the screen with people and things going on and all kinds of city lights and city traffic being coordinated this movie was a failure at the box office and sort of ruined quite a bit i mean he didn't get the money he needed for later features and if you watch this movie you probably can see why there's really not much of a plot here it's slow in places if you don't like slow movies and it also is not exactly clear what it's about so that's what this video is i'm trying to help you answer the question what is this movie about why do people actually like this it's ranked for example in the british film institute's poll sight and sound poll in the top 250 movies ever who would in the world would rank it that way actually i would so let me tell you why first the movie does have a tiny bit of a through plot as american tourists arrive in the paris airport they're led around by tour guides they inadvertently sync up with the major hulo character at a gadget show and later at a restaurant and then you see one woman singled out a very beautiful american tourist woman she goes around and then she's at the the restaurant later on where she meets up finally with the majora hulo character and then by the end they're together as a movie plot might have two lovers meeting or to meet cute with two potential lovers meeting but spoiler alert there's a sad melancholy ending in which the two part inadvertently and she goes back so you have sort of a arriving in paris and leaving paris via the american tourism and tourist trade idea in this through plot with major hulu appearing every now and then hulo is not as featured as much in this movie as he was in previous affairs monger hilo's holiday in particular also mon uncle and then you get the american tourists being featured more here not just with this group but later on in the restaurant scene which lasts for 45 minutes a large american tourist and his wife he's a fun-loving man and he sort of enjoys the restaurant saying you'll see him a little bit in the movie now once then this movie is comparing tourism and visiting a place with living in a place as well it's making fun of american tourists and what they want out of paris in particular and what you see in this movie almost throughout is sites of modern paris buildings that you could see in london and in all parts of the world in fact the mocks tourists and their desires to see things that they could see at home first the americans at some point say oh this stuff is american this is just like home and it reminds them of home as well the posters in the tour guide office it has featured these buildings modernistic buildings and they're all the same and i think tati wants to criticize uniformity as well as the desires of tourists to see the same thing everywhere a problem in modern life the erasure of quaintness the erasure of individuality and particularity and thus enters major hulo a very particular interesting character a bumbling mime-like figure who almost never talks into tati's great creation what he has fun with is in this movie are the look-alikes several points in this movie characters walk up to who they think is hulo someone who looks like hulo and they mistake him for somebody else and tatia is even saying hulo is being duplicated even who low has look-alikes and so this idea of modernism whatever that is replicating itself and spreading throughout the world and all parts of the world look alike it's actually detrimental in a problem but tati is having fun with that once again in this movie major hulu cannot find a job once again he's mistaken for thieves or various people who are doing wrong and once again he bumbles through life and you have no earthly clue how he could possibly make money or what he's doing in life and i think that hulo character that interesting goofy absurd person great contrast with modernistic paris with all the buildings that are squares the windows that are squares the lines that tell you where to go everywhere on paths and on signs and it's a very efficient semi-rationalistic paris that we've got here with shades or shadows of classic french sites like the arc de triomphe and the eiffel tower you only see them in relief or in reflections and doors and that's mocking as i said the american tourists who don't go visit those sites just visit the modernistic places they could see in new york city for example or london or other parts of the world and so the paris that we've got here is a gray boxy liney as i said modernistic place that i think is a threat to the unique paris that was i say this because this thing comes up and tati's previous feature mon uncle but here it's on display maybe in disturbing ways i think if i if i'm getting tati right i'm disturbed by the things that i see in here as far as lots and lots of traffic dominating the automobile taking over the city almost destroying the human scale stuff the buildings the streets the paths and the quaintness and uniqueness of old paris on the other hand tati although he mocks that lightly has fun with it and wants to say the world is an absurd place no matter what humans create as far as their environment and their cultural circumstances humans are very goofy creatures and so we're not all unlike major hilo in fact probably we're all like him to some extent and so everything can be played around with the movie's title play time is just that let's take the restaurant scene for example the restaurant scene which is 45 minutes of sheer chaos and joy one of my favorite stretches in film period any movie ever this is a great stretch of film it comes after you see the paris airport and the modern office building and the gadget show you're set up to have an another modern boxy liny place which is organized rationally but this restaurant has just been finished in fact it's not even finished there are lots of problems with it electrical problems architectural problems galore and so when this restaurant opens it's not ready people though inhabit it they run into stuff they mess around and things get messy and crazy and i think that's one of the ideas in this movie that this modernistic paris being created is going to fall apart and yet people are going to organically develop it and have fun with it and the feeling this is tati's main feeling to me the feeling of joy will spread throughout whatever humans happen and tati loves crowds commercialism here in this restaurant scene i think is being championed not a kind of a predatory commercialism but a fun-loving service-oriented goofball sort of commercialism in which people are just enjoying themselves and guess what even though this movie mocks american tourists the large american tourist he makes things happen by just enjoying the chaos of the scene and and really sprucing it all up in fact when the band leaves at one point for creating a dance scene and creating all this sort of fun loving chaos the american tourist takes over and ha and you know creates the musical scene and creates his own place in the background where all the chaos has happened and what's a viewer to do at once we're supposed to i think worry a little bit about paris but also just realize that joy can inhabit any place and the organic development of people wanting to enjoy themselves and enjoy life and live it to its fullest can happen in any site even if the modernist architects want to force us into some efficient rationalistic box or the urban planners want to fit us into lines on the street and traffic moving just down lines or down paths we are going to open that up and develop it and make it ours and make it joyful and quaint even the restaurant scene really it's one of the few scenes i can think of in which crowds or groups of people really work well on screen i think movies are for showcasing individuals individual faces and that's one of the reasons we love to watch movies is to see pretty beautiful or unique individuals up on screen as much my azure hulo is but this restaurant scene has dozens of people in almost every shot usually two or three groups of people doing different things there's different levels or depths to this restaurant scene and you see a whole social environment with different levels and different situations in it and it's all joyful and you can watch this movie perhaps 15 times and not come close to observing everything if you just want to look at the restaurant scene you can't observe everything happening in that scene it's just hard to find where to look around and you focus only on one part of the screen but the next time you watch play time you see something else happening another part of the screen and you combine them this is a masterwork by jacques tati as far as showing the sociology social groups on film very few people have rep very few directors have replicated this kind of thing and then made it joyful and fun especially and i must be personal here i'm an extreme introvert i avoid crowds and parties and so to watch this restaurant scene should annoy me or creep me out and in fact it does at the very beginning for the first 10 or 20 minutes of it i want to keep my distance from it i'd rather not be in that scene because i don't like groups of people well by the middle of the end of this thing i'm wanting more and more i want this restaurant seem to go on i even want to be there and i feel the joy that tati is bringing up in this movie with the absurd you know architectural structures here that humans have to you know run into or mess around with for example the bartender who nearly hits his head on the boards above him the giant column terribly misplaced in this restaurant the electrical work that goes haywire for example or the very small window in which the the trays of food are passed between the kitchen to the servers it's all ridiculous but not in a bitter or you know extreme mocking way it's tati's having fun with these absurdities and he's saying despite these problems these rational problems these efficiency problems humans will enjoy themselves and make this restaurant their own and it's just a wildly good time at the end to me tati is a great architect or one of the great architects of film and he's while he's railing against in his own lightly playful way modernist architecture he's creating his own kind of architecture that has joyful fun with it so this movie's title where by the end the traffic is like a carnival scene and it's goofy and ridiculous is tati's i think preferred aesthetic you find it mont uncle obviously measure hula's holidays you find it as later movie traffic but i think this movie showcases tati at his best and so for me this is his masterwork and one i would put in the top 20 movies ever because i find this to be something that i aspire to myself i want this sort of level of joy that he has despite environments that i dislike or find to be ugly in spite of crowds of humans that i'm annoyed by i want this level of joy and so tati he found a way to showcase that in a very well done beautiful at times highly technical mastery here of sight and sound and of of course he's a writer director actor in this movie this is one of the great accomplishments in movie history in my opinion so it deserves to be studied and enjoyed and if for nothing else you don't watch this for any other reason enjoy it what do you think of this video let us know in the comments what you think about it and please leave us a comment and subscribe to this channel for more great content thank you have a great day

Channel: Learning about Movies

Views: 2,705

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: great movie, film criticism, understanding movies 101, film grammar, playtime, playtime tati, tati, tati movie, playtime movie

Id: IpqxW2Ja2Tw

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021