How to Tame Modernity?
Situationist Practices in Jacques Tati’s Playtime
● Writing
From his very first feature-length film, Jour de fête, Jacques Tati was concerned with how individuals navigate the environment of the modern city—a theme that later became central to Mon Oncle, which earned him an Academy Award. Yet it is only in Playtime (1967) that the action fully unfolds across an entire urban landscape, no longer limited to specific social groups or communities, but addressing the broader question of urban activity as such. As with his previous films, the plot is minimalist: it all takes place within the span of a single day, during which Monsieur Hulot and a group of American tourists arrive in Paris for a business meeting and some sightseeing. They move through various urban zones—business, residential, recreational—until their paths converge at the grand opening of the Golden Garden restaurant.
What’s remarkable in Playtime is that the city it portrays—an ultramodern, rationalized version of Paris—had no real-life equivalent at the time. Faced with the absence of an actual urban space that embodied the aesthetic and ideological rigidity of postwar modernism, Tati resorted to constructing his own architectural fiction. The result was “Tativille,” a meticulously engineered modernist simulation of the French capital. Designed by Eugène Roman, the set was built entirely from scratch: a geometric grid of steel, glass, and concrete that embodied the International Style’s obsession with transparency, repetition, and control.
Tativille was not just a backdrop, but a functioning urban prototype—its movable modular structures, fully paved roads, working traffic lights and infrastructure all served to make the illusion of urbanity complete. Yet this was not a utopian projection: by staging his film in a fabricated city that exaggerated the logic of modernist planning, Tati intuitively revealed its absurdities, rigidities, and alienating effects. Through its very artificiality, Tativille becomes a cinematic construct that allows us—as viewers and critics—to read Playtime as a subtle yet incisive reflection on the urban transformations of postwar Paris, increasingly shaped by corporate rationalism and spatial standardization.
The Space of Tativille
In Playtime, Tati visualizes the modernist city as a stylized abstraction: a perfectly rationalized space where Paris seems to have been erased, replaced by a sterile grid of glass, concrete, and steel. The familiar landmarks are barely present—at most, they shimmer as distant reflections in polished façades. What remains is a kind of architectural nowhere: a city stripped of historical texture, cultural specificity, or spatial orientation.
In the film’s opening shot, the camera lingers on a glass-and-steel structure modeled after the ESSO building, its shimmering surface dominating the frame like a cathedral of modernity. But this “cathedral” is devoid of transcendence. It’s monumental, yet empty—an emblem of modernist ambition already on the verge of obsolescence. Tati’s Paris is built entirely from repetition: identical office towers, interchangeable interiors, standardized furnishings. The logic of modularity and mass production governs not just the buildings but the rhythms of daily life. Office spaces, residential units, and transit zones are all rendered indistinguishable from one another, creating an urban environment of perfect homogeneity.
The film's visual language mirrors this standardization. Tati's static compositions and deep focus flatten the image, reducing architectural space to a diagrammatic field in which individuals seem miniaturized and estranged. People do not inhabit the city so much as pass through it—tiny figures swallowed by vast lobbies, corridors, and glass boxes. The geometry of the city becomes a trap: every corner looks like the last, every direction equally disorienting. Tati thus stages the city as a closed system, one that operates independently of its inhabitants' desires or needs.
From a critical perspective, Playtime resonates strongly with Henri Lefebvre’s diagnosis of modern urbanism as a spatial regime that commodifies everyday life. The film does not make this argument overtly, but it enacts it visually, through repetition, visual echo, and the mise-en-scène of control. What we see is not merely a space to be lived in, but a space to be navigated—efficient, surveilled, and ultimately dehumanizing. The city is no longer a place of encounter, but a transit machine, optimized for flow but emptied of meaning.
Alienation and Disorientation
Tati portrays modernism at the moment its founding ideals begin to wear thin. In Playtime, it is architecture that dictates human behavior, enacting Wolfgang Welsch’s apt observation: “life follows architecture”①. Urban space no longer reflects the lifestyle of a community—it imposes ways of functioning upon it.
The first scene of Playtime immerses us in a vast, anonymous hall—an indeterminate architectural space that might be an airport, a hospital, or an office complex. Its function remains deliberately unclear. Nuns and military officers drift through sterile corridors; patients or passengers wait in silence, spaced far apart, as if communication were structurally impossible. The hall is oversized and eerily clean, its dimensions dwarfing the people who inhabit it. This is not merely a design choice, but a statement: the environment alienates, isolates, and neutralizes human presence.
From the outset, Playtime sets up a world of what Marc Augé famously called “non-places”: transitional zones devoid of identity, history, or relationality②. The terminal is not a space of belonging, but of pure movement—a space in which nothing is meant to happen except passage. Its architecture is not designed to be lived in, but to regulate behavior, to streamline and suppress. By depriving the viewer of spatial context, Tati generates a subtle sense of unease. We don’t know where we are—and neither do the characters.
In constructing such an environment, Tati lays bare the psychological cost of modernist spatial logic. The pursuit of efficiency and uniformity results in a loss of orientation, agency, and social exchange. When the same sterile aesthetic is applied indiscriminately to every function—waiting, working, arriving, living—the result is a landscape of total abstraction. As if anticipating Guy Debord’s critique of the “society of the spectacle,” Tati presents a world where surfaces have overtaken substance, and people move through spaces designed not for interaction, but for observation and control.
The effect is at once comic and unsettling. Tati’s minimalist choreography—his precise staging of movement and sound—turns the scene into a visual gag about miscommunication and malfunction, but also a quiet critique of how space dictates behavior. The non-place is not neutral; it disciplines, it fragments, it isolates. And yet, within this rigid framework, the seeds of resistance begin to sprout.
Hulot and the Drift: Spatial Resistance through Spontaneity
Into this hyper-regulated, frictionless world enters Monsieur Hulot—a figure both out of place and out of time. Dressed in his trademark coat and hat, he seems ill-equipped for the glass-and-steel metropolis he finds himself in. Initially, Hulot arrives in Paris with a clear purpose: a scheduled business meeting with a man named Giffard. But almost immediately, that purpose begins to dissolve, overtaken by the sheer inertia of the urban machine. Unable—or unwilling—to follow the signage and cues of modern circulation, Hulot begins to drift.
This drift is not simply a narrative device, but an aesthetic and political gesture. Without naming it as such, Tati stages a cinematic version of dérive—the Situationist strategy of aimless urban wandering③. Hulot's movement through the city is guided not by goals but by circumstance: he is nudged by crowds, distracted by noise, swallowed by elevators. He moves in tangents, detours, loops. The city does not direct him; it misleads, absorbs, and releases him. In this way, Hulot becomes a vehicle for spatial resistance—his body refusing to obey the logic of the grid.
At the same time, his presence exposes the latent absurdity of modernist space. In one scene, Hulot is ushered into a waiting room so sterile and oversized it resembles a fish tank. He awkwardly interacts with a hyper-designed chair, repeatedly sitting and rising, prodding the upholstery, puzzled by its strange acoustics. This moment encapsulates his role: a protagonist who encounters modern objects not as tools, but as puzzles—foreign, ironic, often comically inscrutable.
What Hulot performs, almost unconsciously, is détournement: he repurposes spaces and objects against their intended functions. He trespasses, lingers, confuses utility with play. Where others walk in straight lines and obey architectural cues, Hulot meanders. His lack of understanding becomes a form of critique, transforming the logic of modern space into a stage for improvisation. As a result, even the most functionalist environments begin to yield unexpected experiences, unplanned encounters, small eruptions of spontaneity.
What makes Hulot’s presence so compelling is that he does not rebel—he simply does not comply. His body refuses to synchronize with the mechanical tempo of the city. In this sense, Hulot functions as what Walter Benjamin called the “distracted viewer”: one who absorbs the modern environment not through conscious analysis, but through tactile, bodily experience. He is perpetually slightly out of sync—bumping into glass doors, stepping out of frame, misreading spatial signals.
Where the other characters are absorbed into the smooth choreography of the city, Hulot’s gestures interrupt. He embodies a kind of soft resistance: clumsy, unassuming, but effective. His spontaneous movements carve out fissures in the urban logic, allowing for moments of contact, absurdity, and recognition. The modernist environment, designed to standardize behavior, cannot fully contain him—and in that failure, it begins to unravel.
Hulot’s dérive is not heroic. It’s hesitant, accidental, at times even foolish. But that is precisely its power. His failure to “fit” becomes a way of revealing how much effort modern life demands from those who wish to conform. Where the city requires straight lines, Hulot offers curves; where it demands clarity, he brings ambiguity; where it expects utility, he returns play.
Reclaiming the Space: The Subversive Carnival of Royal Garden
The turning point of Playtime unfolds not in a city square or a boardroom, but in a restaurant. The Royal Garden, ostensibly a chic, high-end venue, becomes the unlikely stage for collective liberation. Initially presented as an over-designed and poorly executed modernist interior—unfinished walls, malfunctioning fixtures, a dance floor that peels underfoot—the restaurant quickly begins to unravel. But in that unraveling, something extraordinary takes place: architecture ceases to dictate behavior, and the space is reimagined, reclaimed, repurposed.
This is not merely chaos—it is what Guy Debord might call a constructed situation, an emergent moment in which lived experience interrupts the logic of the spectacle. Designed as a consumerist enclave, the Royal Garden was meant to structure desire through image and control. But its failure as a system opens a crack in the spectacle, allowing for authentic use over passive consumption. As spatial dysfunction accumulates—jammed doors, erratic lighting, collapsing ceilings—the patrons cease to perform the role of compliant clients and instead begin to produce space in the Lefebvrian sense: through collective improvisation, affective interaction, and creative appropriation.
Here, détournement becomes collective. Guests and staff alike abandon the script of exclusivity and decorum. They dance, rearrange furniture, rewire their relationship to the environment. The space, once rigidly codified, becomes fluid. Use overtakes form; activity supplants design. The room becomes less a restaurant than a scene of carnival, a momentary commons born within and against the very space of commodified pleasure.
This inversion of spectacle—where the watchers become actors, and the designed environment becomes a backdrop for lived experience—recalls Constant Nieuwenhuys’s vision of New Babylon: a city no longer organized around production or consumption, but around play, drift, and creativity. What we witness is not utopia but its sudden, embodied glimpse—emerging not from planning, but from collapse.
The visual shift matches this transformation. Where the first half of Playtime was cast in muted greys and cold light, the Royal Garden pulses with saturated color—deep reds, golden yellows, rhythmic blues. These are not just colors; they are affects, signaling a shift from passive occupancy to emotional, shared inhabitation. The spectacle of control breaks down, and from its ruins, a spatial commons begins to form.
The Morning After: Everyday Utopia
Playtime does not end in rupture or destruction. Instead, it closes with quiet transformation. As dawn breaks, Monsieur Hulot and the group of tourists make their way to a small café for breakfast. The chaos of the night before has passed, but something essential has shifted. The once-sterile space of the city now glows with warmth and color. The café, modest and local, radiates a sense of intimacy. Croissants are shared, jokes exchanged. The characters, once scattered and disoriented, now act as a community—however fleeting, however accidental.
This final sequence may seem subdued, but it encapsulates the film’s most radical proposition: that resistance does not require revolution; it begins in the micro-movements of everyday life. The forms of control that governed the city—standardization, surveillance, spectacle—have not been overthrown, but quietly disarmed. What remains is a new rhythm, a new way of being in space. The social energy unleashed in the Royal Garden carries forward, shaping encounters, gestures, and even architecture itself.
In this moment, Tati gestures toward a Situationist vision of the city reclaimed—not through masterplans, but through lived practice. What the International Situationists demanded through manifestos and theory, Playtime performs cinematically: a dérive that becomes collective, a space transformed through use rather than function, a spectacle that collapses into participation. As in Guy Debord’s imagined city, or Constant’s New Babylon, freedom is not a design—it is a behavior. A way of moving through the city that rewrites it as you go.
Tati’s final gift is not a blueprint for change, but a demonstration that urban transformation begins not with architecture, but with attention. With drift. With misuse. With laughter. With the will to see space not as fixed, but as open, relational, alive. Playtime becomes both a diagnosis and a remedy—a quietly joyful call to re-enchant the city, to reclaim everyday life from the logic of control, and to remember that every movement, no matter how small, can be revolutionary.
In Playtime, the political is never bombastic. It resides in hesitation, in deviation, in the shared glance across a café table. Tati’s cinema suggests that the most radical act may be to dwell gently in a space that demands efficiency, to build community where only consumption was intended. His is a politics of softness—of dérive as a form of care, of spatial reappropriation through joy. It is in this quiet refusal to obey that Playtime reveals its most subversive truth: that tenderness, too, can be revolutionary.
① Wolfgang Welsch, Our Postmodern Modernity, trans. R. Kubicki and A. Zeidler-Janiszewska, Warsaw, 1998, p. 133; qtd. in Jacek Tarnowski, Aesthetic Transformations in 20th-Century Architecture and Urbanism, “Estetyka i Krytyka” [Aesthetics and Criticism], no. 2, 2002, p. 15.
② Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. R. Chymkowski, Warsaw: PWN, 2010, pp. 53–54.
③ Graham Cairns, The Alien Occupation of Space in Playtime: Parallels between Jacques Tati, Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists, p. 8, http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/44816/07_Graham-Cairns_Alien-Occupation.pdf(accessed June 3, 2015).