Friday, August 14, 2009

Play Time

The Younger Son chose a foreign film tonight (bless his heart), and The Husband and The Daughter sat through the entire movie without a word of complaint. Play Time is a Jacques Tati film, released in France in 1967 and in America in 1973. We have the Criterion edition, and I also watched the short biography on the 2nd disc.

There's some video from the movie here:


There are several still shots from the film here. DVDTalk has an appreciation. FilmReference.com opens with this:
Jacques Tati's Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society.

Only the Cinema calls it
one of the most exuberant, free-spirited, formally playful tributes imaginable to the spirit of invention and humor that leads people to make their own fun in the most unlikely of contexts.

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