Playtime

Playtime was French director Jacques Tati's fourth major film, shot between 1964 and 1967 and released in 1967. It is famous for its enormous specially constructed set, known as Tativille. In Playtime, Tati's character M. Hulot and a group of American tourists lose themselves in a futuristic glass-and-steel Paris, where only human nature and a few hints of old Paris emerge to breathe life into the city. New technologies, billed as conveniences, are satirized as merely complicating life, an interference to natural human interaction. Playtime depended greatly on visual effects and sight humor, and Tati consequently shot the film on the high-resolution 70mm film format. Playtime was a commercial and critical success in France, but failed to find an American distributor, and its enormous cost eventually forced Tati to file for bankruptcy.

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