Playtime 4K 1967 Ultra HD 2160p

Jacques Tati is a legendary French comedy director whose style is unmistakable. Playtime is his greatest masterpiece: a two-and-a-half-hour witty reflection on the world of triumphant capitalism, which François Truffaut himself called “a film from another world.” In static, complex episodes, Tati shows us a web of concrete and glass structures where people desperately try to find some kind of human contact — but, of course, cannot. Several stories unfold in each frame: the background in “Playtime” is no less important than what is happening directly in front of the camera.

User Review

More than any other film by Jacques Tati, Playtime resembles a mosaic. It is assembled from fragments of different stories, united by the character of Monsieur Hulot who appears throughout. It seems that there is no story as such, and the plot of this film can be summarized in a single sentence. However, as in Tati's other works, there is a lot of action in this film (sometimes it is even difficult to keep track of it all, because so many stories can fit into a single frame), and if we go beyond describing the plot in one sentence, we will have to retell everything that happens in the film, because Tati was able to fit many plots into one sentence.

This is the most interesting feature of Jacques Tati as an author—his films are contemplative, he does not argue or get to the bottom of the truth, he simply observes. But usually ‘contemplation’ is perceived as inaction on the part of the viewer, and yet he cannot be inactive in the world, in life. He observes - and this is action, this is life, and therefore he observes not from a distance (and how can a person distance himself from the world?), but from within, examining the bizarre details of the surrounding endless action.

The ‘observer’ and at the same time an integral part of the action is the Parisian Monsieur Hulot, who, having once gone to a meeting with some official (in a case known to Tati), finds himself caught up in the modern flow of life in tourist Paris. He is literally swept away by a crowd of people obsessed with fashion and technology, and poor eccentric Hulot is forced to wander through a maze of offices, getting involved in stories that are sometimes only accidentally related to him.

Sometimes we see glimpses of the real Paris in the city obsessed with progress that Yulo has discovered, but only in the form of indistinct silhouettes reflected in the windows of endless offices, which are immediately replaced by the frantic rush of noisy crowds.

Yulo meets many of his acquaintances—former comrades-in-arms, each of whom has found their niche in the new world—whether it be working as a doorman in an expensive fashionable restaurant or living in a comfortable apartment in a modern high-rise. Yulo, carried away by the flow, rushes past them all, watching his contemporaries at work and at leisure, in all the diversity of their monotonous lives. He is as if not of this world, he is a piece of old Paris, another life, in which there was no such hustle and bustle and hysteria, no endless race and progress for progress' sake.

Tati himself recounted the plot of his film as follows:

'A group of foreign tourists arrives in Paris. Orly Airport is almost indistinguishable from the airports they have seen in Munich, London, or Chicago. They board a bus that is no different from the ones they rode in Rome or Hamburg, and drive down a street lined with the same streetlights and buildings as in their capitals. They find themselves in the same architectural style that was created to live by the command ‘Attention!’ '

Tati looks at the modern world with irony and sometimes surprise, but he does not indulge in meaningless lamentations about the world that has passed. After all, he is able to see traces of that world in modern life, to see something real, humanly interesting, funny, or even sad against the backdrop of high-rise buildings, electronic panels, and neon lights—in all this, he finds something human and therefore, perhaps, does not despair. No matter what changes the world undergoes, there will always be Yulo, and that means there will always be hope for the revival of the old, or rather for the creation of a new world, a humane one despite pragmatism and technocracy.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (92.6 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#French: DTS-HD Master Audio 3.0
#English: FLAC 2.0

Info Subtitles