LACEFilms’ Sunday sojourn with aesthetics and understanding of cinema this month focuses on renowned French comedic filmmaker Jacques Tati who etched his name amongst the pantheon of film comedy’s legendary figures with a small but exquisitely conceived body of work.
In astutely reinterpreting some of comedy’s oldest and purest techniques, filtering them through distinctly modernist framework, Tati became an influential guiding light for generations of comedians and filmmakers that followed. Tati also introduced to celluloid, his most enduring character — the near-silent and bumbling Monsieur Hulot Donning with his trademark comical hat and arching his pipe inquisitively.
Tati, who virulently assailed complications of contemporary French society by publicly citing particular grievances with self-automated blandness of modern homes and workplaces, was famous for his recurring themes of alienation and disenfranchisement in his films.
Nearly nine years in the making, Playtime — French director Tati’s fourth feature — is structured in six sequences. It’s linked by two bumbling characters who keep bumping into one another in the course of the film. It is a subtle, yet complex cascade of visual and cerebral comedy wherein Tati stitched together all of his ideological concerns in one tightly packed visual canvas. Brimming with his trademark traits, where Tati plays Monsieur Hulot, a comic character, the 70 mm film is legion for its enormous, specially constructed set and background stage, known as Tativille. Hulot is a passenger ambling through fully modernised and robotic Paris of sleek glass and steel office towers. The city’s treasured monuments are but a fading memory, seemingly incongruous with the new ethos of cold conformity.
The gloriously choreographed, virtually wordless comedy of chaos in the age of technology sees Tati at his creative acme and is played out by the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, supported by a host of other lost souls, all groping their ways. With the film’s every frame teeming with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a testament to modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion, also dwelling on the antagonistic relationship between man and technology (in Tati’s case — architecture and design) and eventual human transcendence.
Grandiously designed and curiously executed, Playtime is a uniquely conceived piece of cinema. As Tati once said, he endeavoured to produce films that would make people smile. French film-maker Francois Truffaut praised it as ‘a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently.’ That should sum up the film’s quintessential quality. Despite its critical success, the film however, was a massive and expensive commercial failure, eventually leading to Tati’s bankruptcy. Incidentally, during the filming of Playtime, Tati made a film about his comedic and cinematic technique, Cours du Soir, wherein he gives a lesson in the art of comedy to a class of would-be actors.
Screening will be at 4 pm, Suchitra Film Society, B V Karanth Road, Banashankari II Stage. For details call: 26711785 / 9900146487.
