The most ambitious and perhaps greatest situational comedy ever made. Jacques Tati's fourth major film optimises its enormous set (known as 'Tativille') to build a motion picture of vast scale and majestry, yet remains deceptively intimate and regularly dumbfounding. Playtime sets the auteur's famed Monsieur Hulot on the loose again in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris, tangling intermittently with a troop of nice American matrons on a 24-hour trip. Not so much a saga of the individual against an increasingly dehumanised decor, it's more a semi-celebratory symphony to Tati's sensational city-set; all reflections and rectangles, steel, chrome and gleaming sheet metal. Shot in 70mm with aging colour that looks almost like monochrome, recorded in five-track stereo sound with scarcely a word of speech (the mysterious language of objects echoes louder than words), and consistently alternating between central and supporting roles, this jewel of Tati's career is a hallucinatory comic vision on the verge of abstraction.
Film and UFC obsessive with a passion for scribbling words about them. Avid NFL fan and big Chelsea supporter too.
Film Studies degree graduate from the University of Brighton.
