Jacques Tati's PLAY TIME

I saw a 70mm print of it last Saturday at the California Theatre in San Jose, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Play Time may be the most orderly and controlled meditation on chaos and confusion ever committed to film.  Tati built an entire chunk of city, peopled it with hundreds of actors and cars, and took years to complete the portrayal of forty-eight hours in the life of the charmingly scatterbrained Monsieur Hulot.

The plot is egregiously simple, and there is no dialogue of any import.  Hulot is swept to and fro like a piece of flotsam on the urban tide: missing an appointment, getting hopelessly lost in an office/shopping complex, attending the rowdy opening of an ostentatiously chic eatery, and, finally, forging a tender and very human connection with an American tourist whose story unfolds parallel to his until their paths finally cross.

The people who connect in Tati's world are the innocent, the naive, the outsiders--the ones who are actively bemused or amused rather than passively impressed with their austere surroundings.  The American tour group is hustled from one anonymous "sight" to another, unable to tell the Left Bank from the Right, one country from the next.  Only Barbara, the woman with whom Hulot bonds, sees individuals and flowers, and feels the power lines of history running deep beneath the high-rises and multilane roadways.  To Barbara and Hulot, modern conveniences are superfluous to a happy existence.

The meticulously constructed environment is one of the main characters.  Sound is another.  An officious secretary's heels tap smartly down an endless corridor; massive glass doors thunk open and shut; traffic noise and tomblike silence are juxtaposed in aural smash cuts.  A jazz band wails.  A malfunctioning neon sign buzzes and clicks.  A door slams with a sound like a feather falling on velvet.

Time is increasingly capricious.  The simplest act seems to take an eternity, yet an entire day evaporates in the blink of an eye.  If the map were any truer, it would be the territory.

Tati eschews close-ups on any of his actors, including himself as Hulot, preferring instead to cram the frame with as much detail and simultaneous action as possible.  The city he creates is so full of life and revels so completely in its frenzied hive of activity that the viewer, rather than becoming confused or faltering under the oppressive glare of metal and concrete and glass, is imbued with a sort of euphoria.  The more chaos there is, the greater the chance of transcendance.

The film is a profoundly interactive experience.  This is not simply 1967 Paris, it is all of modern life.  Through the divisive and dystopic elements that, in a film like Gilliam's Brazil, might drive the characters apart, shimmer a vibrant and joyful unity.  In Tativille, we are all in it together.