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It must mean something to seek what, according to Marcel Proust, is the so-called lost time. And it is indeed true that, when we reconsider past events, we see them under a sparkling light, so golden as to overshadow the negative aspects. The past is therefore an inexhaustible source of discoveries and rediscoveries.
Just to say, thanks to the influence of a cinephile father, I had the fortune of watching films that struck me at a young age. And the one I'm about to mention is not only a particular title ("Playtime"), but it's the work of an author who seems forgotten by contemporaries, namely Jacques Tati. Yes, because it is not only the fact that he passed away in 1982, but also the easy oblivion of his name from the list of great directors who have recently passed away (it is spontaneous to cite Hitchcock, Fellini, Kubrick). It's as if Tati had disappeared completely from general attention, a kind of Ettore Maiorana of celluloid. Yet, his cinematic style has been influential not only on contemporary authors like Jerry Lewis and Blake Edwards, but also on others afterward such as Lynch, Kaurismäki, Anderson, and even Nichetti himself (just watch "Ratataplan" ...). His was an important contribution to the growth of twentieth-century cinematic art. In line with the fundamental lesson of various Chaplin and Keaton, Tati drew upon his previous experience as a mime and, as an astute observer of human social behavior, offered a disenchanted look at modern mass society and the consequent alienation of the individual. And with a graceful and ironic style, minimizing dialogue and favoring observation.
In order to make "Playtime," Tati spent a good 3 years of work, even creating a mini-neighborhood later called Tativille, based on the ultramodern district of La Defense in Paris. The overall cost would be exorbitant and, given the poor box office of the film, Tati lost a lot of money. In the film, the protagonist, always the famous monsieur Hulot (alias Jacques Tati), faces not only the modern technological innovations concentrated in the villa from the previous "Mon Oncle," but actually has to navigate a modern city that would be Paris itself. Only this is not the romantic metropolis known as "ville lumiere." Here, if anything, the silhouette of famous monuments like the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, can be found only reflected in the glass doors of Tativille's modern buildings, as if they were mirages in the desert.
For the rest, Hulot and the various characters of the film (including a group of American tourists) wander disoriented in a modern city similar to a thousand others. And the kind of relationship that develops between the individual and the hyper-technological city emerges, based primarily on sounds, light signals, guided paths in gray and hyper-functional offices, so that people seem like automatons eluding each other, incapable of truly communicating. The modern city thus resembles a gigantic labyrinth, and monsieur Hulot, like the American tourists themselves, wanders aimlessly between corridors and uniformly and impersonally furnished venues.
Meeting people and visiting Paris will only be a great illusion. Fortunately, however, even in such a hyper-organized reality, it can happen to find oneself at the opening of a luxury restaurant, called Royal Garden, where the modern decor shows anomalies to the point of literally falling apart, with disastrous and hilarious results (a situation later echoed by Blake Edwards in "Hollywood Party" the following year).
Re-watched today, the film has not lost its shine, and Tati's Hulot, so lanky as to resemble a lunar Pierrot, qualifies as a stranger to modern and technological society. He is like a stateless person looking perplexed at the hyperkinetic mechanisms of the so-called civilized consortium. His is a gracefully ironic representation of those times (but today it wouldn't be different if we only think about the current obsessive use of smartphones...). Tati was a convinced dissident regarding the customs and behaviors of consumer society.
And if I think that I saw "Playtime" for the first time with my father in March 1968, my thoughts turn to how effervescent that historical moment was. To the point that, among the various events of that year, the then-candidate for the US presidency Robert Kennedy delivered an important speech on the need to consider a nation's well-being not only based on GDP data but also based on other factors that contribute to the quality of life. We know how things ended badly for Robert Kennedy, but others also thought like him, and in Jacques Tati's works, it clearly stands out how modern man's life must abandon certain frenzies to be truly balanced and in line with natural rhythms. Needless to say, decades later, this necessity is still unmet.
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