Modern life is not rubbish

Forget Antonioni: Jacques Tati had the right attitude towards the trendiest trope in early sixties cinema: the soullessness of Modern Life. In Playtime, newly restored in a Criterion edition which can only be described as incandescent, Tati is more bemused than sad by modernity; he catches people who love the chic new toys but stumble when they try to make them work, but instead of laughing at them his 70 mm compositions reminds us that they're part of something larger even if they're oblivious to it, or -- in the case of Monsieur Hulot -- can't understand it. Plate-glass windows never looked tastier; you can almost chew on their gleaming surfaces. The soundtrack captures a city hip to its own trendiness. The buzz of a drugstore's electric sign has a soothing effect, as does the emerald glare the sign casts on Hulot and the patrons. For the American tourists stepping out of tour buses, Paris is the place to be because it's just like America; and wasn't this the idyll that post-modern advertising promised to realize? Every city is just like your city. Playtime argues that the sterility of Cold War architecture is a palliative against the corrosive effects of the job for which you're working in that building in the first place; that architecture and noise pollution can be part of the "experience" of modern life*, which is what I infer from studying Walt Disney World's Contemporary Resort Hotel and Tomorrowland in their seventies incarnations.

The familiar Hulot is peripheral to his own film, a wraith in a trenchcoat. This fact and the recurring sight gag of the restaurant valet imitating a door by holding a massive knob is perhaps the closest Playtime approaches didacticism: if we love our things we become things. But in this tinkerbox world, is that so bad?

The worthiest compliment I can pay to the restaurant sequence which dominates the second half is that it summons the gleeful grownups-playing-naughty air of Viridiana's Last Supper scene, or, better, L'Age D'Or. Where the creator of L'Avventura and La Notte would have tut-tutted watching his revelers carouse as a restaurant (literally) collapses on and around them, Tati can't begrudge them their fun. The fat American who gets mistakenly bumped from table to table, rather than losing his temper, is cheerful when the waiter switches a footlight on with an abrupt kick. Again, the compositions' expansiveness implicate the viewer too. Try to resist this, Tati seems to say.

This film is the best evidence that Franco-American aesthetic policy is fruitful in a way that foreign policy never will.

* Isn't this what Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance and Dub Housing suggest too? The difference is in the privileging of senses. Playtime emphasizes aural and audio stimuli while the Ubu stuff emphasizes aural and olfactory, in an imaginative sense; you can practically smell the exhaust fumes from the Rustbelt factory backdrops.