DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
French director Jacques Tati’s Playtime was a flop of colossal proportions. The most expensive French movie ever made at the time, it took a decade of Tati’s life, bankrupted him, claimed his house, and after all that, failed miserably at the box office. Its dismal commercial run was only balanced by its glowing reputation among critics. Popular opinion took a great deal more time to come around, but now the film is regarded as a singular masterpiece. It lacks a plot, a protagonist, and for the most part, dialog, at least as it is traditionally rendered. For many audiences at the time, Tati’s grand statement on the place of humankind in an impersonal and technical modern world was too alienating. And for the young revolutionaries of late-60s France, it seemed passe and obvious.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. Playtime is subtle and complex in ways that render it impossible to absorb in a single viewing. Tati shot the film in grand and highly detailed 70mm, filling the massive frame of his wide shots with multiple meticulously choreographed sight gags that often overlap or play alongside one another; they have a surreal hilarity that makes it easy to understand why Tati was such a big influence on Monty Python. Scenes often lack a definite focal point, and action and dialog are in many cases relegated to the background. And its episodic format doesn’t tell a story so much as it sets forth a way of seeing the world. A way that belongs uniquely to Tati, as no film remotely like it was ever made again.
View the (french) trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Alliance Française. $8 ($4 for members).
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Nothing But a Man was practically lost for the better part of three decades, fading into obscurity after its much heralded (for a low-budget independent film in the 60s) release. Revived in the early ’90s and released to DVD a few years ago, the film is far easier to see than it was for many years, though still goes unheard of by many. Its story is the stuff of standard relationship dramas, rough guy from the wrong side of the tracks (taken rather more literally here: he actually works and lives in the rail yard) falls in love with the clean-cut, well-educated girl from the good family that strong disapproves of the union. There are a number of factors that make this familiar setup remarkable in this case, chief among them the fact that the context of the film is an African-American community in the south on the cusp of the tumult of the civil rights movement. Writer/director Michael Roemer never takes his eye off the human drama while creating a film that is loaded with insightful commentary about race relations and the difficult transitions that America was just beginning to go through.
View an interview with the film’s star, Ivan Dixon.
Two screenings only, this weekend at the AFI. Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 3 p.m.
