Lifeless Abstractionist

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PLAYTIME

Directed by JACQUES TATI

Screenplay by JACQUES TATI

There is no doubt that Jacques Tati has the spirit of an artist. A short subject accompanying Playtime shows him to be generally observant and thoughtful, not only about his own film making but also about the world around him and the people with whom he shares it. Unfortunately, he lacks the artist's talent to mold and shape his insights into truly engaging works. This film--made in 1968 but delayed in release here until a satisfactory 35-mm. print could be made from his 70-mm. original--is almost as stupefying as his more recent Traffic (TIME, Jan. 1) and ranks with it as one of the truly excruciating cinematic experiences of recent years.

The enthusiasm that has greeted these latest adventures of Mr. Hulot appears to be the product of critical wistfulness. Tati is the last in a once great tradition of pantomimic screen comedians. Out of a desire to keep that tradition alive, writers seize on the odd, amusing bits in his films, overpraising them while ignoring Tati-Hulot's glaring inadequacies.

Among the most obvious of these is a total lack of narrative drive, both overall and within the individual sequences of his films. Playtime finds him trying to keep an appointment in an automated office building, wandering through an exhibit of new industrial products, attending the opening night of a new restaurant which is trying to maintain a chic air while construction workers are still trying to finish the place.

These are promising enough settings for comedy, but Tati never develops any dramatic tension within them, partly because he seems to have no firm attitude toward them. Modernism was an actively malevolent force in Chaplin's Modern Times; Tati sees it as nothing more than a minor nuisance. His greatest problem, however, is that unlike Chaplin--or Buster Keaton--he hasn't the faintest idea of how to link one gag to another, building the kind of comic line that tightens, tightens, tightens around them and ensnares the audience in analogous helplessness, the kind that results from masterfully orchestrated laughter.

The air of aimlessness that hangs so heavily around Playtime is thickened by the fact that Hulot cannot be said to be a character in the sense that Chaplin's Tramp or Keaton's Great Stone Face was. He is passive where they were active--even revolutionary--in their relationship to the things and the people who tormented them. Chaplin was insouciantly defiant when pressed, Keaton manically inventive. Both were also incurable romantics. They were people of dimension, people with plans and aspirations and a wide range of feeling. One could identify with them, suffer and exult with them.

Hulot, on the other hand, is just a pleasantly boring presence, a cipher who shows no feelings beyond a spaniel-like curiosity and momentary flutters of frustration that never approach the level of anxiety, let alone threaten him with breakdown. He and the people he encounters are scarcely less abstract than their settings, juiceless and lifeless. Going to a Tati movie for laughs is about as practical as going to an exhibition of Mondrian paintings with the same goal in mind, though the painter may actually excel the actor in terms of motion and emotion. . Richard Schickel

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