PLAYTIME: High concept little boxes full of ticky tacky

Rating: 🏢🏢🏢🏢🏢
[TRAILER]

Jacques Tati traffics in the choreography of the ordinary.

While admittedly this sounds pretty boring (and gets pretty boring to watch, but boring in that way that Cormac McCarthy lengthily describing his characters rolling cigarettes and drinking hot coffee is boring: that boring that is also elating because it romanticizes the tragedy of an era’s infinite mundane), just imagine the scene:

There are dozens of folks moving through multiple levels of the impossibly cold metal and glass modernist machine of a department store. Each of them clearly has a motive (silly as it is), a place to be, a bubble around them which other people may or may not enter, a bevy of objects to interact with, stairs to climb and windows to peer through, chairs to sit in and products to test.

The way it plays out is nothing short of a dance where every player hits their series of quotidian marks with calm but unshakable disaffectedness, and Tati transmutes the loose sociological question of people moving through spaces into an exacting, coldly playful study of people moving through spaces.

Why? Is it engaging? I don’t know, but it sure is weirdly impressive.