updates silent-comedy technique in a brilliant sound film. Through his Monsieur Hulot, Tati observes thirty-six hours in the lives of a group of American tourists in the city of Paris-like M. Hulot himself, innocents abroad in a world of monstrous buildings and bureaucracies. It is a consummate portrait of France, 1968, where the small private voice is drowned out by sounds and rhythms of a somehow more real reality. Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in Film Comment in 1976, called Playtime "the most remarkable accomplishment in mise-en-scène in the history of narrative cinema°.What other film converts work into play so pleasurably by turning the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing?"