Le Crime and Playtime bring history, social phenomena and class struggle at the
center of the picture. The way the
characters -- if Mr. Hulot can still be called “a character,” he who does not
seem to follow any purpose, except when he backs off from situations and
disappears from the set – the way then the actors form groups and crowds and
how these connect and disconnect with their background (the set, which
ultimately expresses a vision of the land) presents in both films a country and
a society in conflict. When one leaves Le Crime and watches Playtime, however, the conflict shifts
place. The obstacle, the tension, the
source of danger and anxiety between people, between people and their “reality”
goes through a radical transformation in Playtime. Whereas the opposition to the collective
enterprise in Renoir comes from an exterior and unnatural danger in the person
of the capitalist Batala, who has to be eliminated the grand old way, by a
murder; in Tati the global dysfunctional set is meant to stay; and it does not
give much leeway in terms of revolutionary epic. The obstacle now is the banal
transparency against which French locals break their nose. The conflict is inside French territory in a very different
way, more difficult to fight off than the misdemeanors of any class of
individuals, however extreme their behavior.
We are going
to look at the way social conflicts are represented in two separate films. This comparison will measure what turns out
to be the profound gulf between the world of before and that of after WWII in
Europe. My point is that, filming the
onset of what we call today the global economy, Tati shows us something not yet
present in Renoir; something we thought was reserved for Third World countries:
colonization.
Let us then consider what the French call l’avant-guerre and l’après-guerre, starting with Renoir.
Collective
Improvisation
Attraction and
repulsion between characters does not happen the way one might expect in
Renoir, who likes to baffle expectations.
For instance, Renoir is the least interested in showing battle scenes of
World War I in the war movie La Grande
Illusion.[4] The war stays entirely off screen. Disarmingly nonchalant in a loose story of
evasion, honor, and a love encounter between a Parisian worker and a German
peasant woman, Renoir focuses on class affinities that cut through
nationalities. That is probably what the international public enjoyed in La Grande Illusion upon release in 1938.[5] His narration made explicit, for instance,
that the German commander (Rauffenstein) and the French aristocrat prisoner
(Boeldieu) had a lot in common in terms of values and gentlemanly conduct: the
self-consciousness of being the last specimen alive of an educated and refined
dominant class; although they shared very little, and on exceptional occasions,
with their respective soldiers. Whether
or not it was in the sphere of the mother tongue, down the hierarchy—people did
not speak the same language. The social
structure is not a joke, even for Renoir.
Social frontiers and social miscommunications have little to do with customs.
This does not
mean that in Renoir the limits of the land have no importance. In Le
Crime de Monsieur Lange, arch-enemy Batala, as well as good man Lange leave
behind visible and invisible frontiers. To create Batala, Renoir lets
improvisation exaggerate the wrong-doings of the traditional exploiter and
capitalist who schemes, lies, hides from his creditors and seduces men as he does
women. There is perversity, even a tinge
of the diabolical in Batala, who is sinking fast under his own schemes, until
he leaves to avoid getting caught, and comes back. Batala returns after a catastrophe we are
told nobody survived. His going in and
out of France (and the world narrated) is shown by a camera montage as a
superposition/confusion of fast-moving rails while a voice-over announces there
was a train catastrophe. This part of
the movie is not clear and does not intend to be so. Several months after reaching the northern
frontier and committing there, we are
to imagine, a monstrous crime, Batala is back on the scene. He returns disguised in the black robe he
stole from a priest who had traveled with him.
Is he also the cause of the derailment?
It is not impossible. In the
meantime, however, Mr. Lange and his friends have salvaged the publication
house he had left bankrupt, and created a successful cooperative of
workers. When he understands that Batala
intends to regain control of everything, Lange kills him, thereby committing
what Renoir presents as a defendable crime.
Batala is the spoiler, the social parasite one finally crushes with
pleasure.
Batala remains
an outsider, and his difference is not a question of degree but of nature. He is too dark, too reckless and immoral for
the solid group of good-humored and hard-working blue-collar people who are now
financed by a young and nonchalant aristocratic boss, Meunier junior.[6] Batala is a foreign body in this social body.
If he was not also a low-life fit for comedy and if he had wings to escape his
mountains of debts, he could say with the Satan of John Milton “Which way I fly
is Hell; myself am Hell.” Batala is so
much of a problem for the community -- no less for his seducing the women than
for his robbing the men -- that he builds against himself a universal
solidarity. Killing him makes of Lange a
popular hero (and we, the public, are to sympathize with Lange, of course). But the presence, even when absent, of Batala
is felt throughout the film.
Critics have
raved about Jules Berry's performance.
André Bazin called it "a sublime creation of villainy".[7] Alexander Sesonske wrote about "the
richness of a character" he thinks is one of the best created by French
cinema.[8] The communist
Renoir was, as director, more interested by the life of a character and the
potential of an actor than by any strict political agenda, although we know
that behind the film there was a group of supporters of the Front Populaire,
then in full swing. "If there was
ever a film,” Sesonske wrote, “which was the collective work of a group, it was
this one." The result could have
been some group manifesto, but according to Sesonske, "Renoir stubbornly
refused to be wholly political... his film transcends the politics of the
moment, for its characters represent more than just a clash of political
ideas" (1980, 199). [9] I agree; but would like to add that what
Renoir wanted to show in the conflicts generated by Batala’s manipulations was
not the “politics of the moment” – although it might have been that as well –
but rather a long-standing underside of French society too shameful to be made
explicit otherwise. Renoir needed to add
fateful undertones to his ambient realism, dark and floating contours that
would be his narrative response to the year 1935, to the intense preparation
for mass conflict; and Jules Berry provided.
The actor satisfied to the plot, the social sketch and the political
message, and to some obscure presentiment, without for one second losing the
caricature.
Around Jules
Berry's performance it is worth insisting on the group production, the
improvised mode Renoir and Jacques Prévert adopted while shooting. "I am sure," confessed Renoir,
"that it would be impossible in this film to know the origin of ideas, if
it were Jacques or I who found this or that.
Practically, we found everything together."[10] This
applies as well to Jules Berry's contribution, who at times, says Renoir, found
his répliques "while Prévert and
I were talking." Notice how
playfulness and invention stem from
group improvisation: "The film was shot in an atmosphere of amusing,
bantering collaboration. We were a group
of buddies." Jules Berry's mesmerizing speeches are not read: Renoir said
in an interview, "Prévert and I would give him his lines, but he always
changed them as he spoke" (Sesonske 199).
Berry's best talks are casual serpentine flashes of words bordering on
incoherence, though rarely without panache and seduction. Alone on the evil side of things, Batala does
not so much dialogue with the other characters as he bedazzles himself
talking. We sense that Batala discovers
the next bit on the spot. Jules Berry
does. Improvisation is perfectly adapted
to a character that has got to get by at any cost.
If Mr. Lange belongs to the working class,
Batala is hard to situate in the class structure of France at the time (or any
time). He is not an aristocrat, although it could be argued that the right he takes
to seduce women had belonged long ago to the lords.[11] Nor does he come from decent bourgeoisie or working class,
without mentioning the peasantry shown twice, in the Prologue and in the
Epilogue, when one of the old men at the bar keeps repeating in his southern
accent, “maybe he [Lange] killed un
nuisible, a nuisance?”
For all its
casualness, grounded as it is in working class attitudes, Le Crime revolves around tragic and fantastic events. There is also a dash of the film noir, due to the gloomy courtyard. It is a funny yet gothic tale of a comedy
dealing with profound social and moral consequences. More than one crime -- the one rational and
realist committed by Lange following upon the other; the one mysteriously
alluded to when Batala returns dressed in black -- make for a complex
narrative. Why this complexity?
The Funny
Camera and the Set
One cannot
seem to be finished with Batala. One is
powerless in front of him and submits defenselessly to his sordid tricks. Batala is suave but vulgar and obscene. His
irrational character embodies a low class type of intimidation and domination
that Renoir probably feels is on the rise with fascism. Once Batala is gone (apparently), the workers
take over and create what Bazin calls a "communal paradise," and the
young aristocrat Meunier junior bounces in to put his name on the social
experience and exert a friendly supervision. Adding to the ease of
transformation, it all happens around the burlesque project of a roman-photo,
“Arizona Jim” (said with a French accent), proud product of the group. The comedy can start. Without Batala’s plundering, collective
energies keep the publication house out of debts and thriving. The magazine
sells. Populism à la Renoir did not mean the abrupt end of capital. There is nothing wrong with money and, among
gentlemen, no need for a revolution if it is not a peaceful one.
This said and
“socialism” in place, Renoir is aware that “capitalist” pressures may come from
abroad. Lange wonders at some point if
he should not ask first his comrades about a money offer to turn the
roman-photo into a movie. Would the
others like the deal, though? Would the workers still control, as a cohesive
group, a movie production that would have to be done, on top, in America? Audiences here may laugh, but this is the
type of questions that preoccupies Lange.
Lange is l'ange (the angel),
of course, the innocent autodidact, the populist “artist.” Lange takes off the working-class beret (Batala or Meunier junior wear
felted hats) and scratches his head when he talks. He is a bit of a naïve on
the outside and almost stupid in front of Batala; but his motivations are clear
where the group is concerned. He cares
for social experiment more than he does for the success of his personal
designs. Something liberating is in the cards when a collectivity goes to work
in a human environment and under flexible rules. [12]
Long,
apparently aimless takes and funny movements of the camera help Renoir create
the required ambiance. The first shot of the movie shows a car on its way to
the frontier, following the meandering curves of a narrow road at night. The
car’s front lights illuminate trees straight ahead at an unexpected angle. What we see of the road is not exactly what
the driver would have seen, unless he were himself the machine. Fixed to the roof and looking up, the camera
does not provide a subjective shot but a puppet-like perspective; mechanical
and funny. As a fleeting part of a narrative that is still to come, the
handling of this first shot may escape the spectator. Blatantly overlooking
state justice, Meunier junior drives Valentine and Lange to the Café Hôtel de la Frontière. Batala could not leave after all; Lange
can. So, that first shot bears Renoir’s
signature, even before we are aware of it.
Renoir is already playing tricks with the camera while his characters
are playing tricks with the law and escaping.
Le Crime opens with a
cinematic joke; and the fanfare music in the soundtrack confirms this
interpretation.
Is there often
a link between part of the setting gaining independence and playfulness in the
movements of the camera? There is
something detached and carefree in the long takes that contribute to the
nonchalance we find so specific of Renoir's style, his casual way of telling a
story. It soon becomes apparent to the
viewer that the apparatus plays its own game to express joy and freedom. But the independent camera can also elicit
anxiety. This is the case at the climax
of the movie, when in the dark of night Lange kills Batala. Fixed at the center of the now empty
courtyard, the camera seems to rapidly but aimlessly wander over ominous
façades and closed windows—so rapidly that it produces the sensation of
vertigo. That the entire story is occurring in one building is a dramatic
device that gives strong unity to the film; but it also dictates conditions to
the shooting. Renoir’s shots are never
aimless, in fact, and less than any, the sequence ending with Batala grimacing
at his own blood.[13] Renoir’s longest shot
is taken from the geometrical center of his set. It is a 360º degree pan shot during which the
camera follows Lange as he walks down the stairway, then seems to forget him
and proceeds full circle with nobody in the screen but the courtyard, to
finally recapture Lange in extremis,
his gun pressed against Batala. This
sweeping move is unsettling; it looses the viewer for what is felt as a stretch
of time and that is what Renoir needs at this juncture.
The movie
plays with circularity on many levels. The choreography of actors, the way the
team of Lange’s friends crowds in and out of the screen follows circular
patterns. The film starts at the end of
the story and ends the way it started, Valentine recounting the circumstances
of the crime to let “us,” the public, along with the country folks at the Café, judge Lange and come to our final
verdict while he sleeps. Also, it could
be added that the circular shot acquaints us with Lange and “Arizona Jim” for
the first time when the camera, forgetful of the actor, but not of his
character, travels over the four walls of his modest bedroom, the map of
America, the circle inscribed on that map indicating the territory of Arizona
-- imaginary territory, of course.
Arizona is not a fanciful circle going over Mexico's border like that,
is it? The camera has just gone on a
tangent the way Lange goes off mimicking gallop and with the same sense of
freedom.
Here is
another case where the shot does not go straight to the point, but takes a
circuitous route. Just before we meet
Lange and Valentine in bed, their passion ready to bloom now that Batala is
gone, we see anonymous people walk out of the fateful train, as though the
crowd of regular folks were closing ranks over his absence. For long seconds, it seems again that the eye
of the camera goes adrift, vagabond among the crowd, forgetting the story; but
it is in effect taking care of the coup
de théâtre and turning point of the movie.
An announcement of the train catastrophe is heard over a radio someone
carries in the train station; then, the voice comes out of open windows in the
courtyard; and finally, it is heard in the bedroom where, later, Lange will
give up thinking about the fateful news and will switch off the light at his
lover’s request. But first, the camera
proceeds in the dark of the bedroom, panning walls, photos and furniture,
before coming to a full stop in front of another radio. The wandering camera has gone into a loop,
from radio to radio. Maybe it ended up
quoting itself the way so many shots in the future New Wave will do?
More than one
sequence indeed predates the kind of cinéma
vérité where improvised ways to carry the camera will bring fragility and
freshness to the picture.[14] This one
starts straight up on a wide view of the sky of Paris, then tilts somewhat
shakily, from the top down the bottom of the Arc-de-Triomphe, tracking at high
speed (from the back of a car) a young man on a bicycle who drives down the
Champs-Elysées, rejoicing with masculine
bravura. We know the man and understand
his happiness: he is the lover of the modest laundress who was seduced by
Batala and gave birth to a still-born child.
Without jalousie, without the slightest reproach, he has pardoned
the laundress. Batala presumed dead, tolerance shines no less than
productivity. In this rapid tilt from the sky then, Renoir expresses how open
(sky open) are the feelings of the young man; how easy is love among popular
folks. On par with that of the end, on
the beach, the final crossing over the frontier, the leaving the country at
dawn, this is one of the rare long shots taken outside and in broad daylight.
Different
Crowds
As a metaphor
of liberation, Lange and his friends rip apart the wall of publicity for the stale
magazine owned by Batala, opening a window so that the same young lover of the
tilt shot may look outside and receive the laundress. As one route that the camera follows in her
free moments, the connection inside/outside is essential. Outside, groups gathered in the courtyard are
seen through openings in the building.
Indoors shots make use of the depth of field during the long takes where
figurants mingle with each other through a defile of rooms, allowing
principal actors to come to the fore and speak their mind. [15]
The complex
choreography this program imposed on Renoir did not go without defects,
however. To improvise and not cut while
handling groups of actors going through series of encounters is no easy task. There is a commotion not accounted for
perhaps in the frigid scene that shows us the team taking photos for the
novella. When Lange moves to the fore,
his lover, Valentine, sort of disappears behind; and it occurs while the screen
is busy with costumed cowboys.[16] After that, a boisterous feast starts,
unanimous (but for one) celebration.
Meunier, next to the old concierge and the newly formed couples sings
Christmas songs. Playfulness is
everywhere. If we were watching just
another comedy, this scene would correspond to the conclusion. We notice how the camera cannot frame enough
people. The screen bursts with
participants. When there is gathering in
Le Crime, the shot is crammed with
actors, leaving no space between individuals, no distance between background
and foreground. So compact is the pack,
individuals disappear and hide each other.
This kind of
commotion does not occur in Playtime,
although more people and many more objects occupy the wide screen favored by
Tati. People are not pressed but
scattered; objects randomly meet on a screen in which they float and in a set
that in any case encompasses them.
Building on the tradition of Renoir’s long takes, Tati takes advantage
of the brand new 70 mm color film technology.
Instead of the coming together as a group, we witness the desultoriness
that comes with gatherings of strangers and, therefore, the formation of a very
different crowd. Tati uses a deep space
type of mise en scène, shot in deep focus, his camera high enough on a
crane to dominate and keep in perspective a large space, several planes where
occur not one, but multiple actions that may not even have to know each other.[17] Interaction between actors is now far from
necessary.
How physically
unified was the crowd in Renoir! His
frame was perhaps bursting, one row of heads might be seen from behind, half a
face would appear in a corner; and still, only one familiar group occupied the
shot. On the contrary, in Tati
foreground action and background action do not know each other, nor do left and
right: some actors may dance while others eat, some laugh while other cry. Something has occurred to the living space
where men and women meet (and don’t) in France.
For one thing, now they literally do not speak the same language. Lost in the large screen, the spectator’s
gaze is supposed to leap over embryonic stories and evanescent interactions
that develop among individuals, themselves lost in a foreign environment. The idea is that this world has become too much (too diverse, too confusing and
conflicted) to be taken in at once by any given person. Tati invents a disconnected composition to
film, not of one story; but at best what ends looking like an invasion by a
polyglot crowd having no limit in terms of money and decided to make of this
night the playtime of their
lives. The party roars in crescendo, leaving no piece of the set
intact, until at the end, it feels as though a cyclone has just gone through
the land.
You might
wonder if all of this is not merely French and suspect that I see connections
-- the theme of celebration, social gatherings around food and drinks -- that
belong to a culture and many films. But
what strikes me is how different Renoir’s party is from that of Tati. It is no longer the utopian source of a
happiness uniting all classes (except for one parasite). In Tati’s nightclub, the French waiters,
workers and their bosses are in the kitchen and behind the bar, cooking, fixing
the set, swearing and sweating to keep up with the appearance of a chic
dinner-party, even as it progresses into a universal brawl. Saving on work and extracting the usual
revenge of the “exploited” and the “colonized,” they serve all night the same
cold fish flambé to successive
American, Japanese and Scandinavian couples.
And the cosmopolitan soundtrack (Brazilian band, Rock n' Roll) only
makes their de facto colonization
more attractive. In the year 1967,
France is a playground and a colony, Tati declares in his tongue-in-cheek kind
of way, half comical and sarcastic, half dead serious. The foreigner is (in) our walls. The stranger is nobody else than an impeccable urban set, its servants and its
customers. It is Tativille itself,
perfect environment built for the enjoyment of a crowd of expatriates who
revolve beyond boundaries. Unless one
considers that Tativille is very much at home and it is “we,” the French
workers, who have been displaced.
At dawn, some
among the revelers ask beret-bearer
locals who seem to have been imported for the occasion, to smile and look
“local” while they take photos. As the
poignant tune of a folkloric accordion ends, we see these regular Parisian
people behind their counters, in "cute" little shops, ready to
serve. France and its people, its
buildings and streets, its marvelous food, including its pleasant dialect of an
idiom, have turned into nostalgic images of themselves. One appreciates the local aspect and the
picturesque precisely when localities and the sense of belonging to the land
are no longer available.
It is sad to
see a nation go under, France becoming “dated" as soon as a crowd of
tourists is introduced; a crowd that behaves upon landing at the airport as
though it owned everything (and maybe it does), until at the end it gets back
to the same airport, thanks to the endless circling of a burlesque and absurd
traffic jam. Tati also liked to go in
circles.
The Autonomous
Set
Straight on
the collective, in Renoir the camera erased the expected hierarchy between
principal and secondary characters. But
Renoir would still have close ups of Meunier or Batala. When dialogue developed, he did not use the
shot/reverse-shots type of editing technique: everybody stayed rigidly in place
as the scene started in plan-sequence, then moved, without cuts, to close-ups.
The process is completed by Tati, whose camera dominates populated space and
does away with close-ups. Understandably so: interactions between principal
characters did not interest him; he filmed the chance-encounters of individuals
mingling in crowds. Mr. Hulot is not a
protagonist having any kind of definite intentions as neither intrigue nor overall plot develops in Playtime. Unless we accept the snapping conclusion of
many brutal gags as such, there are no coup
de théâtre either. Whereas Mr. Lange
was a timid whose facial expression could be picked up by the camera to show us
what he nonetheless fought for, Mr. Hulot stumbles along from one painful
encounter to another. His presence certainly provides a thread between
situations, but his (re)actions appear unmotivated. More accurately, his one motivation --
noticeable in the body movements as a whole -- is avoidance.[18] Mr.
Hulot is in constant retreat. While
strolling in the street, for instance, he finds himself engaged, hugged and
then dragged into the discothèque by an old acquaintance who insists on
recognizing him (he does not) from the time of their military service. Thus
starts the “central” scene of the party.
“In his nondramatized and loitering cinema,”
Michel Chion writes, “in a general shot which he makes his own, Tati spreads out
the signs, gags and characters over the surface of the screen without
hierarchy”. He films the indefinite,
un-centered social fabric of the 60’s, showing how adept it is at making itself
look cool and egalitarian and free, when it is implicitly divided and
ridiculously dependent on commercial objects.
On top of his not organizing the transitions between scenes around the
motivating principle of a plot, Tati bewilders the audience with jump shots and
the discontinuity of angles. He shoots a
scene from wherever he can get the deepest perspective on as many layers of
action as possible. We recognize certain
faces in the crowd after a while and there is a powerful sense of unity coming
from the distant, dominant camera; and, as in Renoir, from the set.
That the
environment may live a life on its own is a trait enormously magnified in Playtime. An array of fixtures, utensils, gadgets in
the background of urban life never end playing tricks on Mr. Hulot, whose
allergic attitude makes perfect sense given that he cannot touch any part of the set without triggering a catastrophic chain
reaction. Once in the nightclub, we
witness the growing misdemeanor of a “design" but makeshift decor that
functions too well and backfires, disrupts individual pursuits as an obstacle
can send particles off trajectory, robbing eventual characters of their
motivations as soon as they are born. If
in the office tower during the first part of the movie, the camera focuses on
nondescript partitions, switchboards and silent doors as they interrupt the
course of activities and give pretext to failures and misunderstandings; in the
second part at the nightclub, Tati tells the convoluted stories of how a
destroyed knob or bulb, how a piece of the ceiling changed the way people meet,
if they ever do. In the airport which is
so clean that it looks like a clinic, Mr. Hulot spends what feels like an
eternity trying to meet with someone he sees in reflections, a man who finally
breaks his nose on a transparent door at the moment of salutation. Already, the old doorman who was to introduce
Mr. Hulot looked overwhelmed by the speaking-machine attached to a blinking
switchboard he had to activate. The set
has turned into the principal actor and it is a brutal, inhuman, sadistic
player whose tribulations unfold the only "story" you will find in Playtime.
Other movies
during the 60’s would to some extent expose this fascinating and frightening
vision of an impeccable, aseptic, automatic, yet senseless and overall fragile,
in a word, destructive environment. An
ultra-modern and, before the word was even coined, a global set plays an
important role in Truffaut's Fahrenheit
451, for instance. However, Tati’s tour de force consists in avoiding the
creation of a fantasy-world, of a science-fiction. Playtime
responds to the social struggle generated by the onset of globalization. Tati takes the pulse of a new wave indeed, of
a new reality: the sudden waking up of France and Europe after the war with a
chilling discovery, that of finding itself irreversibly immersed in a world
whose center is elsewhere. Dependence,
power and manipulation have shifted since Le
Crime. The class structure has
changed, while social difference stays at the center of the picture. Society is perceived as antagonistic in
another way. Now it is reality as such,
man made historic and social reality -- buildings, cars, signs, words -- that
inside France escapes France’s boundaries and taxes its energies. As though the abuse was perpetrated by a
virus lodged, not outside but at the core, international reality engulfs a land
in a dynamic on which nationals have zero control. Frederic Jameson stated some time ago:
"We will be unable to insert ourselves, as individual subjects, into an
ever more massive and impersonal or transpersonal reality."[19] That inability is
already what the nasty jokes in Playtime
demonstrate.
No matter how
“impersonal” modern reality may be, it remains, however, a matter of belief and
consensus, as is any social reality.
Fact and fiction, reality and appearance are not opposed to each other
here. A remaining doorknob can take care
of an absent door as long as the usher and the client for whom he opens with
just the knob in hand act as though the nightclub had a beautiful glass door. Tati could be thought to have a higher esteem
for the usher who fools the client than for the client who is (wants to be?)
fooled; although what such gags make plain is a complicated interrelation where
as long as, on either side, each believes the other believes in the chic of the
club, then it is business as usual.
Props function on stage because the public wants to believe in them; and
so do the complicated objects whose directions we follow in what we call our
“real life.” In truth, the international
crowd is no less the dupe, no less alienated and cheated of reality, than the
French crowd is. To start with, the
tourists never even get in touch with the reality of the city, never come in
contact with the old stones, the famous sights.
They glimpse at the Eiffel Tower and the Arc-de-Triomphe through
reflections on vast window panes. As I
said earlier, “true” Paris is a nostalgic phantom. From now on, “authentic” Paris will exist and
survive and be cherished perhaps more than ever, but in reproduction, a
stereotype, a hyperreal image of itself.
During the
party, the cool nonchalance à la
Meunier junior becomes universal, but under a twisted and false version. This
is clear in the use of the informal "tu" in French: the French camp
still knows hierarchy, e.g. management vs.
waiters -- but it is denied in the “tu” which peppers the looseness of the 60’s
on all relations; as well as, for instance, in the ugly generosity of the
American stock-broker who, pretending at some point in the night to own a destroyed
section of the discothèque, invites the French workers at his table and taps
them on the back. No better way to make
them stronger than to conceal differences in the social body under some vague
posturing at “we are all the same.”[20] Bad
communication and worse: false communication is the proven result, according to
Tati. In this architecture where
transparency dominates, where the interior of living rooms and bedrooms is seen
from the street, where the separation between public and private spaces seems
obsolete, what separates one from one's neighbor is a panoramic, extra-clean,
invisible window-pane. It is modern
openness that brings about non-communication.
Or maybe it is the reverse: the hard fact that nobody communicates is
concealed by the claim, the ideology, the appearance of transparency.
In Playtime, many overlapping dialogues
amount to not having any dialogue. The
set, however, does make itself heard.
Dysfunctional things emit an endless music of concrete sounds. Instead of characterization, psychology of
characters, lines in the mouth of Hulot and his chance acquaintances, we have
passing remarks, confusing mumble-jumble, jokes in Franglish. Instead of a
course of action, we hear an ambient brouhaha, funny interjections and statistical
noise. Considerate human interactions
are beyond the reach of this overdeveloped world, except perhaps when it comes
to the little bit of individualized attention Mr. Hulot finally lavishes on a
young American woman we remember for the color of her dress. Hulot’s gift of a scarf at the end (object
which he does not succeed to give in person) is like the token of an ancient
tradition between men and women that survives, quite to our surprise – a touch
of grace, a miracle. There is desire, even if it did not go anywhere. The problem could not be with sex, for Tati
is not scared to film obscene gestures; but with the expression of feelings.
Tenderness, affection is almost unimaginable in Playtime, where love is a thing of the past or of an improbable future.
The hyperreal
dominance of American-English on French territory generates most of the puns in
the half-audible and not-meant-to-be-understood mixture that fills the
soundtrack. Even if it is
anxiety-provoking for an audience (French or otherwise) not to understand what
goes on in a film, Tati is coherent in this respect. When voices spend time translating what they
just said, it complicates the regular run of things and renders communication
the more difficult. The half-comprehensible brouhaha is in keeping with the
Bauhaus aesthetics of armchairs that respond noisily to your body, the silent
doors that shut in your face when they want. Again, the source of conflict is now to be
found not between the social classes of a given community but, more radically I
think, between crowded individuals and the superior, though trivial, modernity
that surrounds them. One cannot
eliminate this strange reality the
way Lange killed Batala. Tati’s set is
in hyperspace.[21] It is neither simply an object nor a human
subject. It may look phony and
artificial but it is not an artifice that could be removed the way one removed
(or at least dreamt of removing) a social nuisance. This nasty real is the place where neo-servants and
neo-masters, local and international crowds, enter (or not) in contact. If the effect is comic in that we do laugh at
the painful results, it is not human enough to give rise to comedy.[22] Nor does it allow for fantastic
disappearances and tragic returns.
People now hurt themselves on a pervasive but elusive form of power,
which like Proteus has no face, and many.[23] Tati turns his back on the genres that
individualized conflicts, which does not mean that he eliminates violence and
the jouissance, the intense relief that comes with it. To facilitate (and witness, in our case) the
destruction of the set is actually the one great pleasure left to
individuals. Although it is a defensive,
reactive, aimless violence and not a political act, not a revolutionary program
nor liberation, it does procure relief.
Playtime gets funnier as the night proceeds and
more drunkards describe elaborate arabesques through the broken doors of the
dilapidated disco. When someone falls at
the bar, the high stool he sat on is turned upside down like some ready-made by Duchamp, so he can stand
protected inside. The big brassy knob of
a glass-door Hulot bumped his head into while trying to shake hands with the
usher, later serves that same usher to create the make-believe door, and then
it is recycled as a recipient for tips.
Where the “system” breaks down, Tati shows that a small space for human
invention can be created. Once the
ceiling has fallen apart and the hired band is gone, people gather, as they do
after a disaster, in pockets of conviviality.
Hulot’s American friend improvises on the piano; a woman sings exactly like French people sang once
upon a time, in the pre-war days. We are
touched (at least I am) because we know it is passé. Revolution,
liberation in common is not an option; but unlimited consumption and the
useless and piecemeal destruction of what destroys you as a whole and one by
one is still possible. No doubt that, in
Tati, there is something like an aesthetics of implosion and more than one
glimpse at a catastrophic beauty. One
cannot avoid and refuse the new. One has
to embrace even the inhuman, he says.
That is what makes of him a master at filming the violence of our
present world.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of
postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, May 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
notes