PlayTime

Jacques Tati spent nine years and his entire fortune making PlayTime. Construction on the purpose-built Tativille set began outside Paris in 1964: a whole glass-and-steel cityscape of office blocks, airport corridors and apartment buildings, complete with a working road system, built to give Tati exactly the depth and reflection he wanted. The film was shot in 70mm (one of the few European films of its era to use the format) and released in December 1967.

It was a commercial catastrophe. Tati had to declare bankruptcy, the rights to his earlier films were seized to pay creditors, and he never recovered financially. Critics saw what he had made almost at the time, though, and their regard has only grown. Sight & Sound's critics' poll has placed PlayTime in the top hundred for half a century; Roger Ebert included it in his Great Movies series; Cahiers du Cinéma critics keep coming back to it as a permanent reference point.

The film is built from long, deep-focus tableaux in which dozens of small visual jokes play out simultaneously, often at the edges of the frame. There is no protagonist in the conventional sense: Hulot drifts through the action, but so do many other figures the camera follows for a few minutes and then loses. It is made to be watched again and again, in cinemas large enough to hold the 70mm image. Recent restorations have made that possible once more, and revival programmers consistently rank it among the titles their audiences ask for most.