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Comment: Used like new, disc perfect, includes original BFI insert booklet in excellent condition, from private collection. Official UK BFI Region 2 PAL DVD release as pictured. Aspect ratio 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, colour. Original international dialogue with some English subtitles. Runtime 125 mins. Extras (45 mins): Feature commentary by film historian Philip Kemp; Short documentary 'Au-dela de Playtime'; Continuity supervisor Sylvette Vaudrot on Tati and 'Playtime'; Director biography and short film about Tati; Original Trailers for 'Les Vacances de M. Hulot', 'Mon Oncle' and 'Playtime'; optional subtitles for the hearing-impaired.

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Playtime [1967] [DVD]

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Jacques Tati (Actor, Director, Writer), Barbara Dennek (Actor) Rated: Universal, suitable for all Format: DVD
4.3 out of 5 stars 31 customer reviews
9 new from £11.50 7 used from £7.92

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Product details

  • Actors: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Rita Maiden, France Rumilly, France Delahalle
  • Directors: Jacques Tati
  • Writers: Jacques Tati, Art Buchwald, Jacques Lagrange
  • Producers: Bernard Maurice, René Silvera
  • Format: PAL
  • Language: English, French, German
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.85:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: U
  • Studio: Bfi
  • DVD Release Date: 6 Sept. 2004
  • Run Time: 123 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B0002CVMBM
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 68,447 in DVD & Blu-ray (See Top 100 in DVD & Blu-ray)

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Product Description

Product Description

The third movie in French film-maker Jacques Tati's series of comedies in which he stars as the accident-prone Monsieur Hulot, who creates chaos wherever he goes. Hulot and a group of American women tourists travel through Paris. While he struggles to keep an appointment, they search for the romantic Paris of old. Tati's satirical view of modern city life was played out entirely on a vast mobile set, known as `Tativille', just outside Paris.

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  5. Les Vacances de M. Hulot [DVD] (1953)
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Customer Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 starsWhether it's a masterpiece or a failure or both, Playtime remains an essential Tati movie
By C. O. DeRiemer HALL OF FAME on 9 July 2007
Format: DVD
Why was Playtime a failure, sending Jacques Tati into bankruptcy and costing him control over his life's work of films? His previous film, My Uncle, had been a commercial and artistic success. M. Hulot's Holiday and Jour de Fete had gained Tati world-wide recognition and respect. He had become recognized as one of the few authentic geniuses of film.

Watch Playtime and I think you'll find the answer. Tati in his earlier films placed Hulot in situations where we could empathize with him. Hulot was an innocent. As we came to like him, we also came to like the people he encountered. Even with their pretensions and idiosyncrasies, we could see something of ourselves in them. Tati might be holding up a mirror for us to look in, but M. Hulot was such a gentle companion that we smiled as we recognized ourselves.

With Playtime, there is little Hulot. Instead, we have Tati's view on all sorts of social and cultural issues, from the sterility he saw in much of modern life to modern architecture, group behavior, impersonal offices, loneliness, boorishness and American tourists. We're observers, and our job is to share Tati's viewpoint. Hulot, now middle-aged, has become a minor player in the film. In his earlier movies, Tati was careful to give us small numbers of people with whom, along with Hulot, we could come to know. In My Uncle, for instance, it was essentially one family and one modern home, along with Hulot's own apartment and his neighbors. In M. Hulot's Holiday, it was a small seaside hotel and its guests. With Playtime, we have a large, impersonal office building, all glass and right angles, filled with people -- employees, visitors, exposition guests, customers.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsPLAYTIME in a barely recognisable, modernist Paris
By Jeff Markham on 10 April 2005
Format: DVD
Misunderstood and occasionally unappreciated ever since its initial 1967 release, Tati's visionary masterpiece is now an undisputed classic. The hallucinatory, hypnotically strange modernist vision of a barely recognisable Paris is quite simply amazing. Hugely influential for its use of space, architecture and Tati's amazing ability to mine subtle observational humour out of literally 'nothing much going on', this visually beautiful film is a must for all film fans. It is also an object lesson to all aspiring filmmakers and critics alike on the use of sound in the cinema.

Tati show us how most definitely less is more, in visual and aural terms. He makes every single second of screen time count. This is incredibly difficult to achieve, yet Tati manages it all with effortless grace and dexterity, all the while charming and amusing us with the immortal Mr. Hulot's hilarious physical comedy. The French Buster Keaton? Why not; they both share an innate genius for visual and physical comedy, and the intuitive appreciation of cinematic space, which few directors, living or dead, ever fully understand. Whenever I see this movie I am reminded of Time Out's famous review of Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), which (I admit I am paraphrasing here) goes something like "The only critical tools you need are your eyes and ears: this is cinema!" How true and so apt of Playtime.

Tati's alter ego, the ever polite, angular Monsieur Hulot, is let loose on a Paris dominated by modern offices, pristine glass surfaces and scurrying, over-officious French nine-to-fivers.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 stars“Play Time” on BLU RAY - UK and European Fans Should Check Before Buying For The Right Issue...
By Mark Barry HALL OF FAMETOP 10 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 28 Feb. 2014
Format: Blu-ray
As you've probably gathered most of the reviews are for the 'DVD' version of the 1967 Jacques Tati classic “Play Time”. And at present (February 2014) this movie is available on BLU RAY in the States and elsewhere. But which issue do you buy in you live in the UK or Europe?

Unfortunately the desirable USA Criterion issue is REGION-A LOCKED.
So it WILL NOT PLAY on most UK BLU RAY players unless they're chipped to play 'all' regions (which the vast majority aren't).
Don’t confuse BLU RAY players that have multi-region capability on the 'DVD' front – that won’t help.

Luckily the superbly presented and restored British Film Institute issue is REGION FREE – so will play on UK/EUROPEAN machines – and offers the bonus of both DVD and BLU in the same package.

Check you’re purchasing the right issue ‘before’ you buy...
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2.0 out of 5 starsGreat presentation, disappointing film
By Trevor Willsmer HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWER on 17 Oct. 2004
Format: DVD Verified Purchase
This BFI DVD of the 126-minute restoration (actually 125mins - a full minute is taken up with restoration credits) of Tati's monumental box-office failure is fairly impressive. The colour is good, the extras informative (although the absence of the short film 'Cours de Soir' Tati shot on the set is galling). There's only one real problem - the film itself.

It's technically accomplished yet still at times astonishingly bad in its obssessive minimalism. It's not really a matter of finding the jokes unfunny - there are practically no jokes to find, funny or otherwise. Nor is there plot, nor characterization. It's a horrendously drawn-out catalog of nothing. Where some comedies are all set-up and no payoff, this doesn't even have the set-up or, when it does (as in the interminable restaurant scene) it will take a quarter of an hour setting up a not very good gag. I just sat there in increasingly stunned disbelief at how little there was there.

The design is interesting, but Tati seems to think that it is enough and never really uses the environment, as if he is at a loss for what to do with his expensive train set. In many scenes he just stands still in a corner of the set while we watch the extras doing nothing. For a very, very long time. And while Tati does fill the screen with multiple characters doing multiple things in multiple areas of the frame, none of them are ever in much danger of actually doing anything funny or remotely interesting.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

All went well

Published 13 months ago by paulo sampaio
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Fine

Published 13 months ago by Jean-Pierre H.
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Like Keaton,Tati's claim to fame is based on his direction as much as on his acting. Indeed it could be said that the two came into conflict in his later career,his directorial... Read more

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Published 16 months ago by Mike
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Published 20 months ago by David
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent quality movie. A piece of social history.

Published 20 months ago by KevB
5.0 out of 5 starsexcellent

excellent

Published 21 months ago by toni
4.0 out of 5 starsfine

good film, there is a lot to look at but it needs your attention. the detail is great and evocative

Published on 15 Mar. 2014 by anon
3.0 out of 5 starsDisappointing

There are some good visual jokes e.g. the shattered glass door knob.; but the sympathetic human interest that is so heart-warming in Mon Oncle is lacking.

Published on 30 Sept. 2013 by Waveney
5.0 out of 5 starsWhy can't they make films like this any more?

This film is superb. Long but superb. Just think - nowadays, the 'celebrities' all live in glass houses so that the hoi poloi can envy how they live. Read more

Published on 24 April 2013 by Bensontheboxer

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