Jacques Tati’s Playtime’s explores the rapid modernization of Paris and its dehumanisation effect. The city Hulot was in, often dubbed “Tativille”, is symbolic of the architectural and urban configuration which aims to systematise the lifestyle of people in such fashion that would have Le Corbusier nodding his head - “a machine in the garden”, that is. This ethos presumes that building is a design result of function - to allow inhabitation of human - and so the house became a cube which only serves its sole purpose. Governing human patterns that inhabit it, this machine, just like any other, soon proves itself to be less than failure-proof. In his journey through this unfamiliar Utopian landscape, Hulot sees a spectacular struggle of human trying to remain humanistic in a perversely homogenized environment that is supposedly avant-garde.
The Spartan grid arrangement is used extensively in the film, as can perhaps, seen as the source of many of the problems caused to its inhabitants. For example, when Hulot arrived in the office and was trying to navigate his way through to the meeting room, he finds it near-impossible to differentiate between the plenitude of identical cubicles forming a grid-like maze in an open-floor plan. This homogeneity is also expressed in the office workers themselves as all wears the ever-present black suit and tie - a result of the reduction of individual expression of taste that would also be evident in the residential unit scene.
In this scene, Hulot meets an old friend in an ultra-modern, glass-fronted flat. This flat is, yet, another embodiment of the building philosophy laid out by Le Corbusier and Mies Van de Rohe - that a house only represents the domestic behaviours of the users - a form reduced to serves only its intended function. In this way, the flat became just that- a flat cell that is near-impossible to tell apart if not for its fishbowl windows that allows us to see right through to the lives of the resident living inside. This very fishbowl display design, however, highlights the impersonal and stark quality of modern architecture.
The obstruction of modern design to human behaviour is perhaps, most evident in the night club scene. Here, Hulot is ending his day in a dinner club partially under-construction. Ergonomic problems is shown here straight-on: glass doors shatter, customers fell off barstools and their movement obstructed by a raised floor section, waiter’s uniform are repeatedly ripped by the furniture.
In the end, it seems that the grid structure intended to shepherd citizen in which this “Tativille” is arranged in falters to the natural fluidity of human movements. “I am not at all against modern architecture”, said Tati in an interview, “I only think that as well as the permit to build, there should also be a permit to inhabit.” Indeed, even though the machines that Le Corbusier keep mentioning might establish a framework for an efficient and economic, even beautiful, architecture, what is inevitable in the composition would always be the synchronicity of the design to its users that are ever-dynamic, unpredictable, and remarkably- human.
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