Playtime + Night Class

Playtime
France 1967. Director: Jacques Tati
Cast: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Jacqueline Lecomte, Valérie Camille, France Rumilly

One of the glories of French cinema, and a favourite of many a critic and filmmaker, this monumental, visionary work may be Jacques Tati’s crowning achievement. Playtime was Tati’s first film since 1958’s Mon Oncle, and was his most ambitious, elaborate, and cripplingly expensive project; its box-office failure bankrupted him. Years in the planning and making, Playtime was filmed at a massive mini-city (nicknamed Tativille) that the director had constructed in a Paris suburb; it took 100 workers over five months to build the remarkable set. The film’s narrative set-up has hapless M. Hulot (played, as always, by Tati himself) on the loose with a troop of American touristas in a Paris like you’ve never seen before: a modernist mass of gleaming glass, steel and gadgets. What ensues is a wry, wondrous, gag-filled and astonishingly inventive exploration and send-up of architecture, physical space and antiseptic modern life. Jokes teem in every corner; the musique concrète sound is great fun. One celebrated sequence, involving the extended self-destruction of a restaurant, is said to have taken seven weeks to shoot. “Playtime is like nothing else that exists in cinema . . . It’s a film that comes from another planet” (François Truffaut). “A masterpiece among masterpieces . . . The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest” (David Kehr). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 124 mins.

Night Class
(Cours du soir)
France 1966. Director: Nicolas Ribowski
Cast: Jacques Tati, Alain Fayner, Marc Monjou

Tati gives a night class in comic mimicry to a group of enthusiastic but hopeless students, and re-enacts some of his classic skits and sketches, in this short film shot on the set of Playtime. Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 28 mins.