While M. HULOT’S HOLIDAY gently mocked the middle-class summer crowds on France’s Mediterranean beaches, by the time of PLAYTIME (the third full-length Hulot film), writer and director Jacques Tati’s focus had changed to the broader landscape of life in a modern city. While the epic production of PLAYTIME left Tati penniless (and without much choice but to bring back Hulot for his final go before the cameras in the somewhat less pointed TRAFIC), in retrospect what emerges is a perfectionist filmmaker’s grandest statement.

In a world of cubicles populated by a working class unmoving on escalators, PLAYTIME makes a case for the widening distances between the citizens of closely shared spaces. Filmed in stunning 65 mm, PLAYTIME is both hilarious and melancholic, equally full of life and suffocating. Experienced in the digital age, in which the majority of our relationships are fulfilled via the internet and mobile telephones, Tati’s hypothesis on the growing gaps between people casts an even darker shade on modern city living.

Completed following the bittersweet writing of THE ILLUSIONIST (a script intended to heal the battered relationship between Tati and his daughter, it remained unfilmed until Sylvain Chomet’s 2010 animated adaptation, also showing this year at CIFF), PLAYTIME is a comedic paean to the simple seaside life displayed so ideally in MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY just 13 years previous. Forty-three years on, there is still much to learn from Tati’s greatest undertaking.

MH