Playtime (Jacques Tati)

G :-

All Regions - Widescreen 16:9 - Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo - Colour - 119 Minutes - PAL

Includes :-
-Spectacular digital transfer, with restored image and sound
-New and improved english subtitle translation
-"Cours Du Soir" - A 1967 short film written by and starring Jacques Tati
-Original theatrical trailers for "Playtime", "Mon Oncle" and "Les Vacancies De Monsieur Hulot"

Jacques Tati's spectacular cinematic art reached its peak in the gargantuan achievement of this film, "Playtime". Marking the third appearance of Tati's Mr. Magoo-like character, Mr. Hulot, "Playtime" takes as its subject modern technology and its sometimes disastrous and always hilarious effects on the people living within it. As in most Tati films, a minimal plot (the parallel paths of Hulot and a group of American tourists), is held together by a seamless ballet of visual, aural, and conceptual gags. Tati constructed an enormous set, Tativille, rendering a high modern contemporary Paris decked in chrome, mirrors, and glass within which the surreal slapstick of "Playtime" unfolds. Filmed in 70mm Technicolor, with sound recorded on a seven-channel stereo, the film approaches the city form a bird's eye perspective showing the complex yet abstract machinations of people and their technologies, with each character linked to the other and the whole ensemble dependant on the giant grid of the modern city. Objects, people, and sounds vie for the viewer's attention and all exert equal fascination and comedic power in the circus of Tati's modern life. From the airport to the high rise to the nightclub, Hulot weaves in and out of view, leaving a trail of bumped heads, offended sensibilities and curious glances in his wake.

"*****"
-Adrian Martin, The Age

"If you are not completely exhausted by the end of the film, then you haven't been doing your work as a spectator. But never have work and play been so magnificently, deliriously confused here."
-Adrian Martin, The Age

"One of the true monuments of film history."
-Adrian Martin, The Age

"A joyful dance."
-Adrian Martin, The Age

"Perfect achievement."
-Adrian Martin, The Age

"An unusually intelligent, ingenious, witty and wholly individual movie."
-Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

"This jewel of Tati's career is a hallucinatory comic vision."
-Time Out

"PLAYTIME is a movie with an intoxicating effect. And, with "Hulot's Holiday," it's his greatest film: an extraordinary mix of aesthetic rigor and comic madness. One watches 'Playtime' giddy, elated, with the same pure delight with which, as a child, you might have watched the best silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. It's so wondrously strange and crazily reassuring; it's a champagne-and-popcorn movie in which a lone bumbling Parisian in a raincoat - Tati's diffident, pipe-smoking, umbrella-wielding M. Hulot - wends his awkward way though a modern Paris full of steel, glass, concrete and severe right angles."
-CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Tati's films feature extraordinary visual and sound design. His masterpiece, Playtime, takes place on a vast labyrinthine set (dubbed Tativille), where gags proliferate with such rapidity and in so many areas of the screen, that it is impossible to catch them all in one viewing. www.frenchculture.org

"Tati's Hulot on the loose in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris, mingling intermittently with a troop of nice American matrons on a 24-hour trip. The jewel of Tati's career is a hallucinatory comic vision on the verge of abstraction."
-Sheila Johnson, Time Out

"There's Charlie Chaplin. There's Buster Keaton. And then there's the great Jacques Tati…whose brilliant film work remains a 20th century treasure."
-Tom Ryan, Sunday Age

"One of the cinema's most original, inventive and loveable comic spirits."
-Evan Williams, Weekend Australian

"Every one of the films contains moments of sublime inspiration, and seeing them again is a joy."
-Evan Williams, Weekend Australian

"Tati was a visual genius. His films, without being silent, all have the qualities, the beauty and formal richness of silent film."
-Terry Jones

"His work on sound along is extraordinary: symphonies of musique concrete with heart and humour."
-David Byrne

Starring Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, and Sharon Maiden.

Directed by Jacques Tati.