We are pleased to present a new 35mm print of Playtime, made from the restored 70mm print that will be premiered at the Castro Theatre later this summer. At 126 minutes, this restoration adds about 20 minutes to the previously available version, bringing the film closer to the 151-minute original release version.

Through his hero Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati observes thirty-six hours in the lives of a group of American tourists in the city of Paris-like Hulot himself, innocents abroad in a world of monstrous buildings and bureaucracies. It is a consummate portrait of 1968 France, where the small private voice is drowned out by sounds and rhythms of a somehow more real reality. Playtime updates silent-comedy technique in a brilliant sound film. This is comedy as choreography. 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?”