”Maybe we can see a comedy next time?” was the question of my grandson with whom I explore film once a fortnight. Maybe he was somewhat exhausted after all the emotional dramas I had exposed him to. Immediately my mind turned towards Jacques Tati and I felt a kind of obligation to introduce him to this French comic genius. Play Time from 1967 became my obvious choice as Tati’s most complete film with Mr. Hulot as protagonist and as a most particular exercise in observation, which is one of the main themes in our film conversations.

After having seen the film, my grandson’s first observation was that there was no real story, no plot in this film. Mr. Hulot shows up in a world of high-tech, impersonal city-life, blunders through random incidents and walks in and out of groups of people. But nothing sticks, as soon as you think that the scene is set for an unfolding story, Mr. Hulot stumbles out of it again. Once he gets into the midst of a tour group of American women. When you think the slapstick can start, he is not there anymore. We see him being invited by a friend into his glass-walled apartment. Wonderfully funny scenes but also this incident abruptly ends. My grandson reflected that the director must have had an idea behind this.

It led us to a precious conversation about how life is offered to us and how we live our life. We walk in and out of stories without being aware of it. We may even disappoint people because we walk out of a for them ongoing story while we weren’t even aware of that we did participate a short while. We get sad about people leaving unannounced something that was important to us, but they may not have been aware that they had a role in it at all.

Play Time invites us to observe, to look around the world we are creating, to enjoy the moments of real connection and relationship, to accept that very little in the modern, busy, shopping-mall, social media world is static and remaining, but that wonderful possibilities will show up when we step into it and engage. A modern city-life, in which we are invited to both observe and to perform. And it became clear to us: this is a whimsical, wondrous movie that only a master of the art can make!

Rinus Baljeu, June 2023

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