Anyone who enjoyed Sylvain Chomet’s recent animated Jacques Tati adaptation The Illusionist should check out this very different extravaganza, which is the film Tati himself made instead of L’illusionniste. Unlike the painfully intimate story of a father-daughter relationship that was The Illusionist, Playtime is a crowded portmanteau, a kaleidoscope of behavioural patterns in which tourists, bureaucrats, restaurant diners and Tati’s fictional alter-ego M. Hulot intersect in a mammoth glass-and-steel city constructed specially for the film. Playtime combines the filmmaker’s obsession with the clash between Old and New World values with his more formal preoccupation with issues of space, scale and composition. Shot on vast studio sets in 70mm, the film is a work of stunning visual design. As Tati insisted, Playtime’s main character is not M. Hulot but the decor, ‘and the heroes are the people who break it up’.Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Playtime can only be fully appreciated when projected
on a large screen in glorious 70mm. (Notes by Peter Walsh).

Tickets €12