PlayTime

Jacques Tati spent nine years and his entire fortune making PlayTime. Construction on the purpose-built Tativille set began outside Paris in 1964: an entire 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 was forced to declare bankruptcy and the rights to his earlier films were seized to pay creditors; he never recovered financially. Critics, however, recognised the film's stature almost immediately, and that recognition 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 return to it as a permanent reference point.

The film is structured as a series of long, deep-focus tableaux in which dozens of small visual jokes unfold 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 a film designed to be watched repeatedly, in cinemas large enough to hold the 70mm image; recent restorations have made that possible again, and revival programmers consistently rank it as one of the most-requested titles in their catalogues.