PlayTime is an incredible film. I just love the idea of staging scenes that look familiar but don’t function as the scenes we imagined them to be. And I like that he was fascinated with the mundane. So there’s an airport setting and there are people wearing uniforms and people that look like passengers waiting, and there are scenes occurring, but it’s just the form of a scene that you have seen in some way many times.
The way he mixed sounds, where the background noise was louder than the dialogue—having that buried in the background when people spoke is just really brilliant filmmaking. I love the recontextualization. And it’s a masterpiece, with long, huge, choreographed shots of all these entrances and exits and things happening in the background and foreground. So where you’re placing your attention has been subverted so you don’t quite know what you’re looking at or what to look at. And that is incredibly impressive and very inspirational.