How do you say 'drugstore' in French? 'Droogstore'. Nothing to do with Kubrick's (or Anthony Burgess's) Clockwork Orange, but everything to do with language mélange à la Christine Brooke-Rose, the insane multi-lingual meaningless non-communication which has always been Jacques Tati's forte. In Tatiland, different cultures meet but don't always correspond, don't understand each other. But then, neither do the old and the new, the old and the young, and yet: isn't the insanity we're talking about not only here and now, but very much more so since Tati's film in 1967?
Playtime is in a sense science fiction, but then so much science fiction is already with us: the world which Tati creates is so familiar. Admittedly, the high-power brush with the headlights seems beyond the beyond, but the multiple button pushing and automatism seem to resemble our computerised existence today; likewise the endless traffic queues, the obsession with taking (an inauthentic) photo every moment.
Glass is ubiquitous here, people bash their noses on it, it (very oddly) reflects the tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Sacré-Cœur, etc. Without any obvious political agenda, Tati turns this film into a huge criticism of the modern world, its uniformity, its mindlessness, its absolute wish to conform and not rebel, its maintenance of the status quo, in effect its insanity. More than ever, we need people such as Tati to tell people to understand where they're going wrong, what is happening to our world. This film is a masterpiece by a genius of the cinema.
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