Play Time
| Playtime | |
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| Directed by | Jacques Tati |
| Produced by | Bernard Maurice René Silvera |
| Written by | Jacques Tati Jacques Lagrange Art Buchwald (add'l Eng. dialogue) |
| Starring | Jacques Tati |
| Music by | Francis Lemarque |
| Cinematography | Jean Badal Andréas Winding |
| Edited by | Gérard Pollicand |
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Release date
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Running time
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124 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French English German |
Playtime (sometimes written PlayTime or Play Time) is a French comedy film, and is Jacques Tati's fourth major film, and generally considered to be his most daring film. It was shot from 1964 through 1967 and released in 1967. In Playtime, Tati again plays Monsieur Hulot, a character who had appeared in his earlier films Mon Oncle and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. As mentioned on the production documentary that accompanies the Criterion Collections DVD of the film, by 1964 Tati had grown ambivalent towards playing Hulot as a recurring central role. Unable to dispense with the popular character altogether, Hulot appears intermittently in Playtime, alternating between central and supporting roles. Shot in 70 mm, Playtime is notable for its enormous set, which Tati had built specially for the film, as well as Tati's trademark use of subtle, yet complex visual comedy supported by creative sound effects; dialogue is frequently reduced to the level of background noise.
Playtime is structured in six sequences, linked by two characters who repeatedly encounter one another in the course of a day: Barbara, a young American tourist visiting Paris with a group composed primarily of middle-aged American women, and Monsieur Hulot, a befuddled Frenchman lost in the new modernity of Paris. The sequences are as follows:
When possible, Tati cast nonprofessionals. He wanted people whose inner essence matched their characters and who could move in the way he wanted.
The film is famous for its enormous, specially constructed set and background stage, known as 'Tativille', which contributed significantly to the film's large budget, said to be 17 million francs. The set required a hundred construction workers to construct along with its own power plant. Budget crises and other disasters stretched the shooting schedule to three years, including 1.4 million francs in repairs after the set was damaged by storms. Tati observed, perhaps correctly, that the cost of building the set was no greater than what it would have cost to have hired Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren for the leading role. Budget overruns forced Tati to take out large loans and personal overdrafts to cover ever-increasing production costs.
As Playtime depended greatly on visual comedy and sound effects, Tati chose to shoot the film on the high-resolution 70 mm film format, together with a complicated (for its day) stereophonic soundtrack.
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