Funny, provocative, a pleasure to watch: Tati's Playtime

Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) is a pretty great movie by any measure - funny, provocative, a pleasure to look at start to finish. Essentially, it's a movie in which architecture and design are the villains: Tati sets the entire film in what I think is called Le Defense section of Paris - a district that is made up of gleaming international-style glass and steel (or aluminum) towers, with lots of traffic and no street life or neighborhood life. Part of the joke of the movie is that we follow a gaggle of American women on a group tour of Paris, and they stay in this neighborhood and love everything they see and visit - a few shots show us the Eiffel and other monuments in the far distance. It's clear that Tati is not skewering just Paris but the whole modernist movement - one shot in travel agency shows posters of various world cities, all looking pretty much the same. The story line such as it is follows Tati's Chaplinesque protagonist of several comic romp, M. Hulot, through what seems to be a 24 hour journey: arrival at a gleaming airport (at first it looks like a hospital), then a hilarious visit to an office building where he can never get the attention of the man he's trying to see, a walk through an arcade of shops - a modernist take on le marche des puces, I think, with a very funny scene at the stall of a company that makes doors that are silent even when slammed shut. The highlight of the film obviously is the long section in a nightclub - to drive home the point the club is still under construction and the architect is on site with his plans and measures - and everything goes wrong: the furnishings with sharp edges slice up the clothes of the waiters, the service slot is too narrow for the kitchen staff to pass the plates to the waiters, the bar is designed so that the bar tender can't see what he's doing. The scene ends in riotous chaos - and some pretty good dancing - and then the characters head out to a corner drug store for coffee and drinks: this sterile place has replaced the bars and clubs that (used to) constitute the life of an urban neighborhood. Even the drug-store scene is beautiful with strange green neon illuminations. Also a very funny scene in which Hulot visits the apartment of a friend (people keep recognizing him on the street)  with sheer plate-glass walls: the visual juxtaposition of what's going on in the apartment and the one next door is hilarious. Glass doors play a big role in the movie, as characters are continually walking into glass or mirrored pillars, tipping over on poorly designed but sleep furniture, etc. There's very little dialogue - the film almost harkens back to the silent era - but you don't need words to make these points and visual puns. The world hasn't quite come to the horror Tati envisioned - he did not anticipate preservation and restoration efforts and the migration back to the heart of many cities - but the movie still feels in some ways contemporary, or at least timeless.