The numbers for “PlayTime,” one of the four widescreen offerings Aug. 8-11 in the Music Box Theatre’s “Summer of 70mm” demi-festival, tell a simple story.
Make that number, singular. There is exactly one circulating print available in the U.S. of Jacques Tati’s unaccountable, freakishly detailed 1967 comedy, and even that one doesn’t get out much. It’s precious, easily damaged cargo. And I can’t wait to see it again, nice and wide and full.
Conceived in the early 1960s, released seemingly eras later in the same decade, “PlayTme” led to financial near-ruin for its writer-director-star. The project was preceded by the Tati features “Jour de Fete” (1949), “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” (1953) and the Oscar-winning “Mon Oncle” (1958). Though he made two more modestly scaled features, it is “PlayTime” that feels like Tati’s valedictory, as “wondrous strange” as anything in Shakespeare.
It’s more like widescreen visual art, rarely still but rigorously contained. Tati’s teeming diorama is as disinterested in plot as it is keenly attuned to random human interactions in a built city (literally, Tati created a studio backlot without a studio, called “Tativille,” on the outskirts of the real Paris) which fools the eye and distorts our perspective at every turn.
The filmmaker’s signature creation, Hulot, with his loping forward-tilt of a stride, immediately loses his way in an unfamiliar forest of chrome, neon, glass, tourists and a nightclub whose calamitous opening night makes everything not right, exactly, but weirdly enchanted. The movie’s spirit never struck me as light-hearted, the first time or the third. It’s a sight-gag trance, practically otherworldly, and the gags don’t play like conventional jokes in the slightest.
Chicago-based critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, who once worked with Tati and who writes more insightfully on his work than anyone else in English, put it this way: “One might even describe ‘PlayTime’ as a nightmarish maze of confusion, obstruction, and frustration that becomes a utopia once the people take over their surroundings — a gradual process, as Tati conceived it, of human, dancelike movements, either spontaneous or accidental, triumphing over regimented, rectangular spaces.”
What’s the old phrase? The one about writing about music being like dancing about architecture? With “PlayTime,” Tati dances with architecture every minute. Chicago audiences should get a pretty good eyeful courtesy of the 2003 photochemical restoration on display.
Janus Films currently holds the U.S. distribution rights to “PlayTime,” and “they’re hesitant to lend it out, for good reason,” says Music Box technical director Julian Antos, who has been waiting to unspool the massive 70mm film reels for years. There’s a negative of Tati’s comedy housed, he says, in France. But that one doesn’t travel. And this print, Antos says, rarely travels, too.
Beyond “PlayTime” (6:45 p.m. Fri.; 11:30 a.m. Sat.) the Music Box 70mm calendar this weekend includes freshly created 70mm prints of two received Hollywood classics originally shot in the VistaVision process: Alfred Hitchcock’s anxious, accidental 1959 road trip comedy “North by Northwest” (2 p.m. Fri.; 8 p.m. Sat.; 1:30 p.m. Sun.) 1959) and John Ford’s 1956 “The Searchers” (7:30 Thurs.; 4:45 p.m. Sat.; 5:15 p.m. Sun.).
The fourth title in this year’s 70MM fest is “Streets of Fire,” an original print of Walter Hill’s grandiose 1984 musicale with street-gangs-and-bikers-and-Diane-Lane-and-MORE! If you’ve never seen it, or any film even remotely matching that description, your chance is nigh: 10 p.m. Fri. and 8 p.m. Sun.
And then? Well, when next week rolls around, the main Music Box auditorium gets its old, fraying, noisy theater seats yanked, lovingly, out of the floor to make way for new, cupholder-equipped and thoughtfully appointed seats. Various interior renovations, including a makeover for the proscenium arch framing so many memories for so many Chicagoans, continue for a few weeks while the big theater’s closed.
And then, in mid-late September: a spiffier Music Box. But, I hope, the same old beguiler, hopelessly devoted to the occasional, historical, fantastical festival of wide-gauge cinema.
“Summer of 70mm” runs through Aug. 11 at Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; tickets $10-$13 at musicboxtheatre.com
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic
