As part of my ongoing efforts to make this blog as random as possible, I recently subscribed to zip.ca, a site that allows you to rent DVDs by mail. Notwithstanding Zip’s impossible-to-browse catalogue and persistent inability to send me any movie ranked above #9 on my “Ziplist,” it’s a fun way to pretend I enjoy artsy movies. Much easier to click a Rossellini film onto your watchlist, given that with Zip you never know when you’ll actually see the film, than it is to commit to it at the video store on a Friday night when you’re bagged and just want to go home and fantasize that you’re Sigourney Weaver taking care of some pestilential co-work… er, aliens.^{1The following co-workers are exempt from this Freudian slip:}

Zip is how I ended up with the following four movies sitting around (or on their way to) my house, begging for primacy over my fourteenth viewing of The Best of Times:^{2Which I’m not so embarrassed to say I own that I won’t post the information on a blog read by thirteen people, all of whom have watched it with me at least once.} Last Night, Don McKellar’s pre-cataclysm laff fest; Husbands and Wives, that Woody Allen movie where he pairs himself with an unrealistically hot love interest; A Taste of Cherry, whose primary titular allusion in English appears, to my great dismay, to have been lost on Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami; and the one I just finished watching, Play Time, by French director Jacques Tati.

A platitude I’m fond of repeating around the office is, “There’s a thin line between making readers feel smart and making them feel dumb.”^{3Another platitude I’m fond of repeating around the office is, “Don’t make me go Sigourney Weaver on your ass!”} When I read the New Yorker, that line sits at around one dictionary-requiring word per issue. One, and I feel like I’m earning access to a club of intelligent people. Two, and I begin to imagine that New Yorker staffers routinely gather in the Gehreteria at 4 Times Square to mock readers in a secret language they invented for the purpose. The thin-line rule holds true for cinema as well, and Play Time recalled it for me.

Released in 1967, the flick is an intermittently plotted riff on modern France and the influence of a certain overbearing North American culture (hint: not Mexico’s). It took Tati nine years and a bâteau-load of francs to craft,^{4As with most situations that can arise during the creative process, this has a parallel in Gordon Korman’s Son of Interflux (call this the Interflux Corollary). In the book, Evan Nathan Kruppmann’s student-film opus, Omni, requires comparable effort.} and generated that most honourable of responses upon release: critical acclaim and box-office antipathy. So you have to appreciate that I was feeling especially energetic when I sat down to watch.^{5Okay, truth? My real motivation was a gang of bullies from the New Yorker who have lately been calling my sophistication into question. Soon it will be you who is “termatically inkaelent,” David Denby, not I!}

For the first hour or so, I sat firmly on the “feeling dumb” side of the line. To summarize the narrative, such as it is: Parisian main character hooks up with American tourists and gets distracted by a series of encounters in various teched-out Modernist structures. Comic set pieces occur throughout, either wordlessly or with the characters mumbling to each other in a language I can only describe as Simch. I started to cross back into feeling smart when I remembered that there are things worth appreciating in movies other than hot actresses, plot twists, and swelling soundtrack music.

Sad that it took so long, but once it did, out popped the sombre yet slick blue-grey palette of Tati’s (pre-fab) Paris, the geometric precision with which objects such as parked cars and restaurant tables are aligned in the frames, the corner-of-your-eye hints of the Paris of romantic imagination, the presciently Sims-like scene where characters are observed through huge bay windows at an apartment complex (one of many clever uses of glass in the film), the reptilian skin tone of two people bathed in neon at a pharmacy, the splashes of vivid colour reserved for the Americans.

By the last hour, I was feeling pretty damn geniousy, ready to submit a term paper to any film studies professor in e-shot.^{6Titles under consideration: “Grey Time: The Hermeneutics of Colour in Tati,” “Tease and Tautology: A Grand Austen-Tati Unification Theory,” and “Why We Play: Psychogeographical Inferences from Tati’s Paris.”} And Tati leaves off with a Hollywoodish triumph-of-the-human-spirit ending a little something for the alien haters. The point, if there is one, is that watching Play Time reminded me that how much you ask of a reader, or a viewer, should be proportional to the reward on offer for the effort.^{7So, um, about this blog… sorry.}

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Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 11:43 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.