Playtime

For those living in or near Austin, Jacques Tati's Playtime will be playing at the Paramount Theatre on Saturday, August 5, and Sunday, August 6 in a 70mm print. I saw it there two years ago, and I hope to see it again many times. A DVD is available, but if any film needs to be seen on a huge screen, it's this one. The DVD might just reduce it to mush. There are multiple events happening on the screen simultaneously, so the viewer is left to decide what to look at, what people to watch, how to see the movie. You could watch it fifty times without repeating yourself. It's a French film, but it is unsubtitled because the dialogue consists almost entirely of grunts, groans, mumbles, squeals, incomprehensible mutterings, and small-talk pidgin French and English. The film has many things to say about work, play, loneliness, community, and life in a city. It is also one of the funniest films ever made. Tati constructed an artificial mini-Paris in rural France that is this film's setting and filled it with bustling, ugly, beautiful, chaotic life. It is something to see, and I hope you do.