PlayTime (1967)

directed by Jacques Tati

Miyako Singer

Lately, when I am faced with the daily small annoyances of living in a city—getting thrown off a train before my stop onto a steamy platform with 14 minutes to go until salvation, dodging dripping ACs and melting piles of dog shit, weaving my way past slow walkers or worse, people walking in front of me but just a fraction less quickly than I would—I find myself thinking of Jacques Tati’s PlayTime. More accurately, I find myself trying to think like Jacques Tati’s PlayTime.

Tati’s 1967 masterpiece and legendary financial blunder takes place in Paris, not New York City, where I live. It’s not Paris as you’d expect it. The cream-colored stone, mansard roofs, and curved, fairy-like Art Nouveau iron is replaced with a futuristic Paris of sterile glass and steel which Tati constructed himself on the outskirts of the real Paris. “Tativille” was the enormous mini-city set consisting of two functional small skyscrapers, a series of roads with working traffic lights, and a personal power plant, an endeavor which would bankrupt him. His city is intentionally unspecific—its glass and steel spaces could be anywhere. In an early scene, characters walk past a series of posters of Mexico, Stockholm, Hawaii, Japan and in each poster, an identical white skyscraper is dropped unceremoniously behind culturally specific landmarks or people. The only glimmers of Paris come throughout the movie when French monuments like the Eiffel Tower and Arc du Triomphe are seen in the reflections of glass doors.

PlayTime is about a tourist bus full of American women and the good natured but bumbling Monsieur Hulot (the popular Chaplin’s The Tramp-esque comic character played by Tati himself) navigating the city for a day. Hulot and the tour group aren’t traveling together—Hulot is there on unspecified business and the tourists are just tourists, but their paths cross all day. Of course, PlayTime isn’t really about Hulot or the tour group at all. They are a few among hundreds of people navigating six urban spaces—an airport, an office building, a trade exhibition, an ultra-modern apartment building, a glitzy restaurant on opening night, and a Parisian roundabout. It is a little over two hours of sublimely orchestrated people-watching playing out in wide shots where various characters enter and leave the frame, often loudly.

Take the very first scene: in an airport lounge, a seated couple in the left hand corner of the frame watches two nuns walk by, their habits flapping like little wings. The nuns exit and now the wife softly nags the husband, but stops when a man walks by pushing a clattering cart full of plates. Our attention drifts in and out of the couple’s mundane conversation as more and more people walk by until suddenly the camera flips and we are on the other end of the lounge, the couple now far in the background and we now have a new collection of people to watch—a man in a rush holding a bouquet, a lost-looking man who keeps checking a slip of paper, two old ladies, a group of schoolgirls. You could watch the film a hundred times and each time come away with some new combination of people your eyes followed.

The first time I saw PlayTime, it was in 70mm at the Paris Theater and I thought the audience was annoying (a classic case of New York rep theater performative laughter) and an aisle light was shining in my face. It took me a long while to lock into what Tati was doing, all the way up until the restaurant sequence that takes up most of the last hour of the film. My annoyance melted away. When I emerged into midtown, I was newly in love with the city. The Nordstrom on 59th with the wavy glass facade that wouldn’t be out of place in Tativille looked beautiful. Each person seemed a small, bright speck adding to the texture and rhythms of the city. I was moved by the film to observe the world at a warm remove, reveling in the Bruegel-esque busyness and revelry that naturally occurs when millions of people are flung together. I was also moved to find everything funny.

Two dogs going a little out of their way to sniff each other’s butts in such a way that their leashes criss-cross in front of you like a tripwire? Funny. Watching influencers struggle to stage a photoshoot on a busy thoroughfare or in the most crowded section of Central Park? Funny. Two women, each on their phones, drifting toward each other and now directly toward you? Funny. The awkward little left-right dance that happens when you’re trying to get around someone? Funny, though less so when they physically touch your side to move you. Santacon? Funny (just not the way they think). Everything going on in Times Square? Funny and beautiful.

Tati’s city is not a utopic patchwork of charming human moments; it is an inhospitable dystopia, better fit for industry than people. Everywhere in this Paris, the buildings butt up against the clumsiness of humans. When Hulot first arrives in the offices where two major acts of the film take place, an attendant attempts to call upstairs from a comically large control panel. He presses multiple buttons before he gets it right, each one emitting a variety of disruptive and silly beeps. Nothing works quite right here—shoes clack absurdly on the sparkling floor of long hallways, people bump into or crash through glass doors, Hulot himself gets stuck for a spell in the overly high-tech foyer of a friend’s ultramodern apartment building. This architecture doesn’t welcome connection. An old army friend of Hulot’s spots him on the street from a truck at a stoplight. He gets out of the truck and greets his friend, but the light changes and the angry honking compels him to hop back in and drive on without reconnecting.

When I moved to New York three years ago, I felt well prepared for whatever would come—the sticky heat, the smell, hurricanes, subway delays, noise, pests, catcalls, loneliness. I’ve always lived in cities and always intend to. My best reference for the loneliness was “Another Hundred People” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company, which starts “Another hundred people just got off of the train/And came up through the ground/While another hundred people just got off of the bus/And are looking around.” It is a song about crushing waves of crowds, feeling small, missed connections, and the thing where you see someone once a year and make plans that never materialize. The alienation Sondheim described never really terrified me though, it only made me excited to be one of “another hundred people,” the challenge of finding my little place in the center of the universe.

I was basically right. I love living in this city. It’s easy to feel romantic about the Moonstruck fountain and the view of the Coney Island rides from the Q train at sunset and Central Park on the first nice day of the year, but it was also harder than I expected. The year before I moved here, the weather was officially deemed “subtropical” according to the National Climate Assessment. I felt embarrassed for being shocked by how dingy and narrow the grocery stores were. The L and G trains are prone to shutting down on weekends and trapping my friends in their own separate borough. Hunting for my second apartment got so bad I honestly thought I’d have to leave the city entirely, since it sincerely felt that there was no such thing as a $2500 two-bedroom with humane lighting. I learned to hate the mayor, and the governor, and all of my senators, who have attempted to close libraries and cooling centers, court war criminals and demonize protesters, and generally forge a New York City best fit for cars and billionaires.

In PlayTime, the hostile city eventually falls apart, literally. Hulot and the tour group find themselves at a brand-new restaurant and nightclub called The Royal Garden. It’s so new that when the first guests arrive, the place is still in construction and staff are frantically hiding tools. A tile from the dance floor comes off on the head waiter’s shoe. The relatively polite initial atmosphere of the club is punctured by three arrivals: first, the American tour group who are dressed in brighter, gaudier colors than the mostly black-and-white clad French patrons and who are all chatting noisily. Second, a jazz band whose more raucous sound sees the night through to its final descent into chaos. Third, Hulot who immediately breaks a glass door upon entry. For the rest of the night, the doorman tries to keep up appearances by holding the golden doorknob up and pretending to open and close a door for patrons.

As the night goes on, the music gets more and more frantic and the dancing of patrons becomes more and more uninhibited. Hulot accidentally tears an entire piece of the wall down, and the party becomes wilder and lasts all night. When morning comes, the city is changed. Remaining partygoers converge on the drugstore across the street. The closer frame employed here may simply be a function of the drugstore space being smaller than the airport lounge scene earlier, but it implies a greater closeness and camaraderie all the same. After all, many of the characters met at the restaurant and are now the sort of hours-long friends you make on a great night out. 

The American tour group boards their bus to head to the airport and as they do, the city becomes a carnival. Decorative streamers are hung on buildings. There are vanishingly few children in the whole film, and suddenly they are all over the place—holding balloons, wearing colorful paper hats, pranking parents. The bus hits a roundabout and Tati transforms the roundabout into a carousel. Full-blown carnival music kicks in, and the cars begin to bounce. A woman on a motorcycle bobs up and down, as if she were on a carousel horse instead. Traffic (and the music) stops briefly, and a family frantically gets into two taxi cabs. A man sticks a coin in a nearby parking meter, and the ride begins again.

For Tati, the coldness of a city built for business is simply no match for human joy. My favorite bit in PlayTime is much earlier in the film, before the city becomes a circus. A man works the desk at a travel agency. He’s sitting on a rolling chair and he rolls from one end of the desk to another, rapidly answering questions and phones. He is the model of efficiency. From outside the glass building where the travel agent sits, all that is visible is his feet. His back-and-forth scuttering is surprisingly elegant. Looking at just his feet, you might imagine he was dancing. Hulot stops and stares for a while, the only person in the crowd who notices, and bumps into a woman in the process.

I adopt Hulot’s eye and try to catch sights like this. I see a woman in workout clothes pedaling on a parked Citibike as an alternative to SoulCycle, an impromptu Central Park wedding where a member of the party pays off two djembe drummers with a fat wad of cash to stop for a few minutes so they can do their vows, and one time my boyfriend and I accidentally walked into the middle of a snowball fight between a dad and his son. The dad said to his kid, “You can’t throw a snowball at me, I’m going to hide behind these strangers.” More than anything, people are irrepressibly funny.

To look at the city through Tati’s eyes is to be sharply aware of all the ways that capital and ill-conceived technology and raising the rent until every special, personal place is a Cava conspire to ruin a city, while also being open to seeing something hilarious and wonderful every minute of every day. It allows even the most mundane scenes—people chatting and playing on their phones and hauling one too many Trader Joe’s bags along and walking slowly and looking lost or tired or happy—to become a ballet of human life. It is an optimistic outlook so fundamental and unshakeable that it chases away despair. It takes more than accidentally tearing down one nightclub wall to reshape a real city, but it is proof that the walls can never hold.

Miyako Singer lives in New York City where she writes, podcasts, goes to the movies, and places bagel orders which repulse her loved ones (whitefish on untoasted pumpernickel). You can read her newsletter Hoots and Hollers on Substack or follow her on Twitter and Letterboxd @miyasinger.