DVD of the Week: Playtime

There are some films where everything goes wrong yet comes out miraculously, seemingly seamlessly right. Jacques Tati’s 1967 comedy “Playtime,” which I discuss in the clip above, is a masterwork that towers (apt metaphor) even over the great mime and director’s other films—and which cost him his audience, his money, and his self-confidence. (David Bellos unfolds the painful story in his terrific biography of Tati.) It brings to fruition—and to startling maturation—the themes that had obsessed him throughout his late-blooming movie career (he directed and starred in his first feature in 1948, when he was forty-one, and made, in all, only five theatrical features) and embodies them in imaginative craftsmanship that, in its blend of precision and fantasy in performance, direction, and design, is matched only by that of the greatest silent-comedy actor-directors, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His work, like theirs, is simultaneously elaborate and intricate; his gags, both grand-scale and infinitesimal. The colossal architecture of his 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. The creative destruction that the film’s Unhinged American—abetted by Tati’s alter ego Monsieur Hulot—makes for a shambling mini-revolution that, strangely, foreshadows the dreams and themes of May ’68. Tati wasn’t looking at France’s political economy but at its libidinal economy; for him, the land’s gleaming new phallic towers were, above all, cockblockers.