The Great Movies III

Babenco, born in 1946, has been one of Brazil's most successful directors. Pixote was his first great accomplishment, and in 1985, he made Kiss of the Spider Woman, with its best actor Oscar for William Hurt and a nomination for Babenco. Then came two big-budget American films with mixed receptions, Ironweed (1987), with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, andAtPlay in the Fields oftheLord (1991). In 2003 he returned to the homeless and helpless of Brazil with Carandiru, set in the most notorious prison in Brazil and once again showing transvestites and thieves forming their own society in opposition to the corruption of the system.

But Pixote stands alone in his work, a rough, unblinking look at lives no human being should be required to lead. And the eyes of Fernando Ramos da Silva, his doomed young actor, regard us from the screen not in hurt, not in accusation, not in regret-but simply in acceptance of a desolate daily reality.

acques Tati's Playtime, like 2001.-A Space Odyssey or The Blair Witch Project or Russian Ark, is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth. Even Mr. Hulot, Tati's alter ego, seems to be wandering through it by accident. Instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation. It occupies no genre and does not create a new one. It is a filmmaker showing us how his mind processes the world around him.

At the time of its making, Playtime (1967) was the most expensive film in French history. Tati filmed it in "Tativille," an enormous set outside Paris that reproduced an airline terminal, city streets, high-rise buildings, offices, and a traffic circle. It was the direct inspiration for The Terminal, for which Stephen Spielberg built a vast set of a full-scale airline terminal. Although Spielberg said he wanted to give Tom Hanks the time and space to develop elaborate situations like Tati serendipitously blundered through, he provided Hanks with a plot, dialogue, and supporting characters. Tati made Playtime without a story, with dialogue (mostly in English) that is inaudible or disposable, and without a hero.

His film is about how humans wander baffled and yet hopeful through impersonal cities and sterile architecture. Playtime doesn't observe from anyone's particular point of view, and its center of intelligence resides not on the screen but just behind the camera lens. The most sympathetic person in the movie is a waiter who becomes a source for replacement parts. More about him later.

Tati filmed his movie in 7omm, that grand epic format that covers the largest screens available with the most detail imaginable. He shot entirely in medium-long and long shots; no closeups, no reaction shots, no over the shoulder. He shows us the big picture all of the time, and our eyes dart around it to find action in the foreground, middle distance, background, and half-offscreen. It is difficult sometimes to even know what the subject of a shot is; we notice one bit of business but miss others, and the critic Noel Burch wonders if "the film has to be seen not only several times, but from several different points in the theater to be appreciated fully."

Playtime is Rosenbaum's favorite film, and unlike many of its critics, he doesn't believe it's about urban angst or alienation. In a lovely passage, he writes: "It directs us to look around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, activated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform."

Consider how this works in the extended opening scene. We see a vast, sterile concourse in a modern building. In the foreground, a solicitous wife is reassuring her husband that she has packed his cigarettes and pajamas, and he wearily acknowledges her concern. We understandably conclude that this is the waiting room of a hospital; a woman goes by seeming to push a wheelchair, and a man in a white coat looks doctor-like. Nuns march past in step, their wimples bobbing up and down in unison. Only slowly do these images reveal themselves as belonging to an airline terminal.