PlayTime

Drawing on a background in mime and music hall performance, Jacques Tati shaped a rich vocabulary of sight gags and precisely choreographed physical comedy into a singular body of work. With his hapless, old-world alter ego Monsieur Hulot in the eye of the storm, his films offer hilarious and humanizing explorations of the clash between the old ways and a rapid pace of modernization. In PlayTime, a baffled Monsieur Hulot traverses Paris in arguably the pinnacle work of one of cinema’s most beloved auteurs.