A film of protest but also one of reconciliation, Playtime is not only Jacques Tati’s masterpiece but also one of the biggest-hearted comedies ever made. Tati’s bumbling alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, is a man out of time, having grown at odds with Paris in the 1960s, with the arrival of modernity and technology. He staggers through a maze of confounding architecture, design and attitudes in a city he can no longer call his own.

Hulot attempts to visit a government official but grows discombobulated by the building’s odd furniture and space-age gadgets and winds up in a series of misadventures. He careers from an exposition of whirring products to a soulless, luxe apartment building to an excursion with a tourist group from America. Each sequence is beautifully calibrated so that Hulot is at the mercy of modern technology, as if he were Chaplin stuck in the gears of really well-designed machinery.

But all is not lost. One American tourist who hopes to experience the “real Paris” sees in Hulot a throwback to a grander time, and he begins to view the city with her enthusiasm. Together they find some magic in the margins, and Hulot learns how someone can more than make do even when it seems like he might be done.•