Playtime

For this 1967 film, Jacques Tati—the unsurpassed satirist of technology’s inhuman allure—built a grandiose, gleaming glass-and-steel skyscraper city on the outskirts of Paris and conceived his comic crises in the details of its disproportions. In the two zones of action (they hardly count as stories), Tati plays Monsieur Hulot, a tall, spring-jointed, aging Everyman who goes to see a bureaucrat about a document, while a busload of American tourists blithely disembark in a Paris of iconic landmarks that they see only fleetingly as distant reflections in glass doors. The spectacular settings give rise to desire and its frustration when, in the neon twilight, Hulot’s weary glance through the windows of parallel buses meets that of Barbara (Barbara Dennek), a fresh-scrubbed young American. Emotions, identities, and even bodily functions are distorted by the mechanized uniformity, but Tati’s despair is modulated by a sense of wonder. A grimly modern night spot is trashed by an American tycoon’s anarchic revelry—an alternative International Style—and romantic possibilities arise from the wreckage. In French, English, and German. (Metrograph, Nov. 22-25)