With all of the effort put into constructing the set for Jacques Tati’s Play Time, it would have been a bloody shame if the gags and disparate bits comprising the film weren’t the equal of its setting. Of course, since Tati had almost ten years between his previous feature and this effort, the comedic quotient is up to snuff. ‘Natch.

Populating the world Tati created for Play Time are a vast swath of tourists, business men, folks off the street and restaurateurs. Each is given an equally ridiculous set of cultural norms to play out and each does as one might expect by turning superb comedic fair.

What makes this film stand out alongside Tati’s other efforts – apart from the notion of Tativille – is a single scene that basically encapsulates the directors perspective on modernity and the passing wave of previous time.

As a gaggle of female tourists are shown around town, one women who eventually befriends Hulot attempts to take a picture of a street vendor, a vendor selling flowers. The French women isn’t a thing of beauty, but obviously represents a simpler time amidst all of the besuited men, flying in and out of buildings with glass facades, in a hurry to make the next appointment. It makes sense that this tourist wants a picture. But she’s endlessly interrupted by various folks on the street. There’s a Japanese tourist who walks in front of her lens a few times, but bows graciously in apology.

Each time the women reframes the shot, someone else gets in the way. The next problem are a pair of high school kids, attired like an Chuck Berry fans might have been a decade earlier (perhaps pointing to the fact that Tati had been past up by his contemporaries in the New Wave). When asked to move, the boys do so, but with evil sneers on their faces.

It finally seems as if the women is finally set to get the shot she wants when an American soldier, himself holding a camera, comes along assumes the tourist for a Parisian and asks her to position herself next to the flower-woman. The soldier snaps a picture and takes off. At least on person was able to get a shot, it just wasn’t who was there first.

And that’s really what the modern can be boiled down to. It’s not who’s first, what’s fair, it’s just what happens. This film (although visually amazing) and Tati’s career (laudable to say the least) are unfortunate reminders of that.