Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hurlot's Holiday)(1953)
Directed By Jacques Tati
Gentle french slapstick, visual gags, and amazing camera perspectives, in this smart, relaxing little comedy for people who like people watching.
Not as cohesive and thematically strong as the amazing "Playtime", but very satisfying.
No one films crowds and groups of people like Jacques Tati, no one films anything like Tati for that matter. 
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaten have a tendency to ground themselves front and center as much as possible, Tati let's the camera take in everyone, there's so much going on in the backgrounds, blink and you'll miss a gag. 
There's almost no dialogue here, and when there is, it's more like overhearing snips of other peoples conversations, than direct addresses. 
It's a nice, quaint, little movie, where one of the prolonged gags, even involves Tati listening to Jazz music too loud, which inevitably, causes all hell to break loose. 
As for plot, a tall awkward Frenchman named Mr. Hulot goes to the beach, where life is quiet and full of comedy if you look at it the right way. 
The time of this style of slap slapstick is at an end, we are unto Bruno and beyond, but it would be missing the point of this movie entirely to simply mourn the innocence of what's lost. 
Tati made a career of showing the humerus in the mundane, the absurd in the common, the prolonged punch-line mis-perceived as chaos, we call the universe, and all it's myriad environments where humans can be found; office buildings, malls, traffic, the circus, parades, and seaside beach getaways.
In Tati films and all great slapstick every accident holds a possibility, every small mistake can snowball into greater ones, and though they may often lead you astray, chaos always comes through in the end; chaos provides.
Likewise we should learn to play along with the gags of our modern and preceeding eras, which more often than not, are not as different as they appear. 
So lets all turn our cynical, alienated, serious frowns upside down; there's so many banana peels to slip on and so little time. 
Or as the bookish pamphleteer Hurlot constantly tries to avoid, barks at him as he walks away, "Rigorous eclecticism will triumph over capitalism!"
Directed By Jacques TatiGentle french slapstick, visual gags, and amazing camera perspectives, in this smart, relaxing little comedy for people who like people watching. Not as cohesive and thematically strong as the amazing "Playtime", but very satisfying.No one films crowds and groups of people like Jacques Tati, no one films anything like Tati for that matter. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaten have a tendency to ground themselves front and center as much as possible, Tati let's the camera take in everyone, there's so much going on in the backgrounds, blink and you'll miss a gag. There's almost no dialogue here, and when there is, it's more like overhearing snips of other peoples conversations, than direct addresses. It's a nice, quaint, little movie, where one of the prolonged gags, even involves Tati listening to Jazz music too loud, which inevitably, causes all hell to break loose. As for plot, a tall awkward Frenchman named Mr. Hulot goes to the beach, where life is quiet and full of comedy if you look at it the right way. The time of this style of slap slapstick is at an end, we are unto Bruno and beyond, but it would be missing the point of this movie entirely to simply mourn the innocence of what's lost. Tati made a career of showing the humerus in the mundane, the absurd in the common, the prolonged punch-line mis-perceived as chaos, we call the universe, and all it's myriad environments where humans can be found; office buildings, malls, traffic, the circus, parades, and seaside beach getaways.In Tati films and all great slapstick every accident holds a possibility, every small mistake can snowball into greater ones, and though they may often lead you astray, chaos always comes through in the end; chaos provides.Likewise we should learn to play along with the gags of our modern and preceeding eras, which more often than not, are not as different as they appear. So lets all turn our cynical, alienated, serious frowns upside down; there's so many banana peels to slip on and so little time. Or as the bookish pamphleteer Hurlot constantly tries to avoid, barks at him as he walks away, "Rigorous eclecticism will triumph over capitalism!"
Filmed all on one GIANT SET( a set so big it had its own power plant and hospital...)! Mind boggling, slapstick comedy about how human biengs relate to their enviornment. The difference between a world which looks like an endless waiting room and one which looks like carousel, is a matter of how you look a it. 
Hard to follow, at first (kind of the point, it's like a maze), but once you get to the restuarant scene and the social and technological machines break down, everything comes to life in a big way.
If anyone has seen "Last Year At Marienbad", imagine those shifting figures in the garden, crowding through a labyrinth qausi-futuristic Paris (lookout for the Hal 3000 parody), and getting into all kinds of gentle comedic mishaps. When a wall at the restaurant falls down, a tycon sits down in front of it, and declares it the "VIP only section". 
In Johnathan Rosenbaums essay, which comes with the Critereon Collection of this film (thank you CSUN library), he writes, what I think is probably the best description of the film, "It directs us to look around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, activated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform…"
The running gag in playtime is that modernity, in all it's forms, is kind of anti-thetical to human life, or in other words, technology and it's fashions are bad. Glass walls which give the impression there are no barriers, metallic greys to imply efficeincy and technologoccal progress, dull colors to not draw undue attention to yourself in the urban enviornment, a world designed to look like a waiting room, an airport, or a hotel, someplace familiar and sterile.
Anytime anyone tries to use a machine it back fires or derails somehow, while others literally live in glass houses, their lives permanently on display(In one great scene Tatti implies this alienation by showing two families seperated by a wall both watching tv, where from the outside it looks like their in the same room, having a conversation, reacting to each others presence.) What makes "Playtime" trully great, is not that it is a clever satire on modern life, but that it finds a way to celebrate the human biengs who operate these machines and live through these fashions, not merely to mourn them as passive de-humanized drones. "Playtime" offers us a world, where the Waiting Room can become the VIP room, and where gridlock on a Round-About, can become a circus carousel. 
The world in minature, and still a world unto itself. Brilliant, colorful, and completely unique. Reminds me how amazing movies and the enviornment around us can be, if we only take the time to look.
