At the time, this wasn't the case, with the film losing money, which would in turn bankrupted Tati.

It is however, a new experience in the world of films, and fiction in general. Tati had intended the film to be something new, to be something he called a “spectacle cinématographique”, something similar to live theatre. However, what most people do not know is that PlayTime (1967) is more than a film —— it's a theme park.

Welcome to TatiVille. Enjoy your disorientation and reality!

There's a certain theme park I keep thinking of throughout my experience of seeing PlayTime (1967) for the first time.

When I was a kid, specifically ten years old, I had a memorable field trip with my school to this strange edutainment-focused indoor theme park. It is a 'city of children' called KidZania, where kids could play pretend to 'work' in various professions from firefighter, lawyer, journalist, pilot, forensics...everything except executives. Work (or rather, the simulation of it) becomes playtime.

The 'city' itself, while obviously a miniature of a city with child-sized work facilities, looked realistic. Yes, this is an actual theme park. And yes, they are at an extent, aware of the implications of the nature of the attractions (there's a good reason why the park and their cast members call it 'professions' instead of 'jobs').

Chances that you've seen the Defunctland video about the 'genre' of theme parks that KidZania belongs to, that are 'kid cities', with the video pointing out how these 'kid cities' reflects our consumerist society with all the corporate sponsorships baked into the attractions, with the excuse of “it's life as adults know it”. Meaning that children needed to be confronted by the reality of consumerism in the real world, somehow. The 'city' is consumerist because that's how it is in the real world, it seeps into the miniature as a result. (Whether or not the sponsorships 'pills' children into full acceptance of consumerism remains as debatable as the long-term effects are mixed to say the least, but that's another story, or rather, 'an other ztory')

But the miniature city has a surreal, liminal quality to it with the ceilings painted with blue sky and white clouds. Coupled with the dim lighting meant to simulate nighttime and buildings made in the style of the past and present, it looks like a city built inside of a René Magritte painting, which avoids the park from looking sterile and too much like reality. KidZania is the regime of light, in a sense. It keeps the nature of simulacra intact, and the uncanny valley qualities dominating the park, further hardening the wall of separation between it and the real adult world. Therefore, KidZania as the miniature of consumerist society becomes a spectacle, a playtime for kids and spectators to get lost in the zany land of 'kool' kids.

Is KidZania a real city? Ceci n'est pas un metropolitan. Because it's a theme park that immerses you in an imagination of metropolitan life. It's a city imagined through the eyes of a child, witnessing the hectic life of real world. If 'Fantasy' is the main keyword for Disneyland, then 'Reality' is the main keyword for KidZania. The park prides itself as being a 'Better World', a simulation of the real world that is obsessed with details, and yet fully committed in making its 'reality' look too palatable to children that it turns children into adults disillusioned with the actual reality that isn't as 'kool' and zany as the land of 'kool' kids that they stepped into years ago. These adults wish that real working life of adult world is playtime, just as how the park did it. How did this happen? The park's obsession in portraying reality instead turns the miniature city into simulacrum as defined by Gilles Deleuze in his work The Logic of Sense, where the simulacrum becomes an image without resemblance —– in that KidZania bears no resemblance to any existing city in the real world, even with all the corporate brands in the park's attractions. And so, the kids learn that reality isn't playtime, not like what the park had 'promised' them, wallowing and wishing for a better world. The Treachery of Reality.

Once upon a time, I walked inside of a fantasical recreation of our consumerist society that disillusioned my views of the real world. 15 years later, I became an adult and witnessed TatiVille, another city built from imaginations of the real world. I walked inTatiVille, doing the same thing as my trips to KidZania, without the play pretend part that is.

I'm not the first person to talk about KidZania in relation to PlayTime (1967), and not without reason —– PlayTime (1967) reminded me of it a lot. It even starts with a scene set in an airport terminal, just like how you enter KidZania, that is through an airport terminal facade!

TatiVille brought back my memories of KidZania. Hard to not do that with the film's vignette structure of focusing on one thing in TatiVille for a short time before moving on, which for me, felt very reminiscent to the 'gameplay' and overall structure of KidZania where every profession (attraction) takes 15-45 minutes to do, so kids can experience/roleplay as many professions as they want to. In TatiVille, you don't 'stay' in one cubicle —– you see the entire TatiVille, and the unique people inside of it.

Before KidZania, there was TatiVille, that opened to the public thirty-two years earlier....

And now onto the film itself:

TatiVille is a satiric, in-your-face microcosm of our hyperconsumerist, 'bland' society ruled by corporations and the lack of novelty. It looks 'unpalatable' to anyone. It looks 'unpalatable' by default. However, the genius of PlayTime (1967) is that it offers a playtime for the audiences instead of letting them see the dreariness of life and completely wallow in the ridiculousness of it in sadness. In TatiVille, people will find the makings of perfect days, either through the funny shenanigans that life brings them to, or the presence of people like Monsieur Hulot that gives novelty to their days. Even if they're stuck in the 'boring' world, the colors inside their souls will brighten their lives and make it fun. They are changing the world they live in —— into a world they long to live in.

However, nothing in this movie is bland, it's always full of new and novel things. Even with the 'gray' set design, everything is designed to be catchy with clever composition, to be looked at several times with the symmetry and details. Like theme park attractions that you can always go back to. There's always things in TatiVille that will catch your eyes. Each frame is brimmed with details, gags, and zany shenanigans. It's like a theme park. It's playtime!

While TatiVille looks sterile and 'bland' with the corporate-looking buildings, liminal insides, boring cubicles, advertisements and washed-out colours, you can actually feel so much life breathed on it through what's in TatiVille. Never before a boring corporate world look this appealing. And it all owes to the details the background where visual gags, funny background events, and overall hecticness of people in it becomes the grasps of life, resisting the takeover of 'corporate' and keeping the world to look like your imaginations of adulthood and Paris — rejecting the dull reality and wanting to live in a better world. This mixture of hyperreality and whimsy makes the city brimming with uncanny valley that avoids the film from looking like reality. It looks so real, and yet unreal, just like a theme park.

With the curious Monsieur Hulot not wanting to 'conform' to the dullness of corporate life by wandering around, the 'corporate' TatiVille becomes a spectacle of your imaginations of Parisian adult life, straying away from the reality of Paris that the film wants to show you. It makes the film feel like a simulation of Jacques Tati's imaginations of real life. The real life as Tati knew was heading into a consumerist, corporate direction, and it seeps into TatiVille as a result. It's up to the inhabitants to react and live as themselves to fight against it.

Is TatiVille a real city? Ceci n'est pas un metropolitan. Because it's not Paris. It is TatiVille, an immersive, miniaturised depiction of one's imagination of De Gaulle's France. Even when he ruins France, that doesn't mean that he can ruin the people inside it. The people in TatiVille embraces zaniness slowly, as a way to express their growing feelings of disagreement to the 'bland' reality they live in. The closer TatiVille tries to become the real world of De Gaulle's France, the more fantasical it becomes that the city no longer resembles De Gaulle's France, as the people in TatiVille begins to form a new reality, deviating from De Gaulle's France. The film is satirical, and yet it produces an idealised image of reality that people would like to live in. TatiVille instead promises the audience that there is a better world, it's still possible to build one in the middle of corporate takeovers, which is hammered even more in the film's ending. The Treachery of Reality.......that might form a new reality. TatiVille is preparing you for a world you'll want to create.

Get Ready For A Better World.

Every scene in this film felt like theme park attractions, with its own process, start/endpoints, durations, and unique interactions. This gives TatiVille a lot of personality, adding the feelings of whimsy and zaniness that gradually builds up before it fully explodes in the second part where the film fights back against the dreariness and becomes a full-on 'theme park' spectacle, really accentuating the film's very apt title.

The way the camera shows working life in TatiVille brings you in as a visitor to this unique, theme park-ish city. Never staying on the same situation, always showing new and different things, like a visitor engaging in attractions. There's busy airport workers, tourists and tour guides, a flower seller, office workers, salesmen, waiters, cooks, and a busy street. But we don't just merely see them. We also experience them through how the camera focuses on them for a long while before moving on. These are the theme park attractions that TatiVille offers you to experience.

Through the camera and Monsieur Hulot's reactions, the film lets you experience TatiVille as a visitor engaging in the world of the film, and by the time the film ends, you're begging for more. You want the playtime to last forever. You will want to visit TatiVille again and again, to experience all the attractions, especially the ones you haven't experienced. You want to pick up new details in these attractions, and the park's environment. And the lesson you will learn through TatiVille is the desire to fight corporate formality by being zany and whimsical.

Jacques Tati's direction is nothing short of a spectacle. It's less of 'film directing' and more of theme park managing, with the synergy of actors, sets, camerawork creating a whole new immersive world for the viewer to experience through the screen. He accomplishes the task of a Walt Disney with so much ease, you'd believe that Tati would run a successful theme park (Hulotland?), and you wouldn't believe that this film had difficulties in the making. Nearly every scene is a painting, and the staging is very complex, with a lot of actions and directions and events going on in the same frame, and yet never overwhelms the viewer, easily comparable to theme park engineering. The way everyone and everything intersects in TatiVille is the stuff that gets theme park engineers jealous. So much clever planning, patient organizing, and deceptively simple yet difficult choreography.

However, this film does take a LOT of patience to watch. You need to be in the mood for a fun time in a theme park to watch it. It demands you to look at the many details baked into the frames. It doesn't have a 'clear plot' and clearly wants you to be immersed in the atmosphere and the world of TatiVille instead of telling a clear story. The pacing also gets slow at times, but that's what waiting in lines in theme parks are.

In a sense, PlayTime (1967) is a theme park movie. In that the world of TatiVille is just that immersive, built by skilled Imagineers with true vision and story to tell, that you felt really teleported into this new world. Yes, it's a satire of the real world, but wrapped in a fun packaging that you just can't help but get amazed, shocked, and excited at.

So what are you waiting for? Put on your RFID bracelets, get your plane tickets to TatiVille now and experience a one-of-a-kind playtime!

#review #film #Letterboxd #JacquesTati #MonsieurHulot