Yesterday's Gardenia's

...In a preface added to the English-language version, Tati explains his intentions, always an evil omen?remember Vadim's preface to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Clouzot's to La Veritel We are informed that the comic hero can no longer be one individual, Chaplin and Keaton having done that sufficiently...

...a trade fair, where Hulot and others are buttonholed and browbeaten by various hectoring exhibitors...

...Presently, however, things must deteriorate, until a definitive break becomes inevitable, even if, as shown, it makes no sense...

...In fact, this summer marks, I believe, the definitive emergence of Segal as a star...

...he is equally winning in Paul Mazursky's odious film, Blume in Love...

...Much had to be fully, functionally constructed, and the film took three years to make...

...For this wan satire on contemporary living, Tati had to build a section of a modern city of glass and steel, including high-rise apartment buildings, office towers, a replica of Orly airport, a luxury restaurant, and streets that include a traffic circle around which traffic (rather unfunnily) keeps biting its own tail...

...It may be that all jokes are, but in a new context they can at least acquire a fresh sparkle...

...Tati himself ambles about as Hulot, not only acting but even looking like a man who has used up his last comic resources...

...Steve Blackburn is an American marine insurance adjuster working in a gorgeous London office overlooking the Thames...

...For Steve seems not to care a rap about his wife and children, who are ciphers anyway, whereas he and Vicki appear to be perfect for each other...

...but for the sake of universal endorsement-And also because Glenda Jackson, who plays Vicki, is so homely all over ?as little bare flesh and sex as possible must be shown...

...at a closer look, men can feel comfortable and women motherly...

...It certainly is a major effort...

...In A Touch of Class, adultery-prudently, only on the man's side (boys will be boys...

...Or, alternatively, if the picture was "serious," they could part bitter-sweetly and tearfully...

...But all this, regrettably, is only an excuse for not having a comic plot, a humorous narrative (always Tati's chief problem), and scattering one's shots all over the place in the hope of hitting something funny somewhere...

...What an American is doing there can be explained only by saying that George Segal couldn't have played the part as an Englishman...

...must finally be accosted, but it must happen late and soon turn elegiac...

...Playtime, released abroad in 1968, is considered by many his masterpiece...

...A few bits of slapstick are genuinely hilarious, but they are so very rare that one experiences Tati's company not as that of a truly witty person, but as that of a bore who has memorized several good jokes...

...and one of those nonstop mutual heckling contests that couples in '30s and '40s movies were always engaged in...

...Miss Jackson is a bit on the crude side, as is her wont, yet she is masterly both with comic and pathetic exasperation...

...Even if they dared to be of our day, these screenwriters wouldn't know how...

...and a drugstore, where one rallies for a wee-hour snack before the tourist buses move on...

...There are two bigger problems yet...

...This makes me wonder: In the name of what does Tati lampoon modern architecture and society...

...Are quixotic eccentricities like the Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur that much better than regimented efficiency...

...given a bit of new life by the very able acting of Glenda Jackson and George Segal, and a good supporting cast, in which Paul Sorvino, playing a slightly updated Jack Carson part, is outstanding...

...There is, in fact, nothing original about A Touch of Class...

...If you blink as you look at him, he is dashing enough for women to crave and men to envy him...

...What makes the actor so likable despite his lack of versatility (he cannot even get rid of a slight Jewish inflection) and his rather undistinguished looks (his head, for instance, is much too big for his body) is that he falls exactly midway between Robert Redford and Woody Allen, between virile handsomeness and amusingly hangdog schnookiness...

...A Touch of Class is a mildly funny and fiercely dishonest little film that clearly thinks it is telling a timeless tale in strictly up-to-date terms...

...Segal wins both coming and going...

...At a crucial point in the film, Steve and Vicki weepily watch Brief Encounter on television...

...even the jokes are recognizable variants of old gags...

...A homosexual character is presented in the typically bifurcated way of this movie: Part of the time he is allowed the dignity of a witty personage at ease with his deviant sexuality...

...Routines are stretched out and repeated endlessly, gags fatally resemble other gags of just a few minutes before, what is ridiculed is often a cliche (bossy Germans, sheeplike American tourists, a drunken Texas millionaire brashly treating everybody), much of the humor is not firmly based in reality, and absolutely everything outstays its welcome...

...But the sanctity of marriage had to remain as inviolate as the realms of truth, whose very threshold these pictures were careful never to darken...

...It takes about equally long to sit through...

...it is now humankind in general, little people resisting, or becoming prey to, universal mechanization...

...Can one still compose even good imitation Beethoven symphonies, paint even impeccable Rubens nudes...

...Is the bumbling Hulot really superior to the despotic headwaiter or pedantic bureaucrat...

...I hope not," comes the reply, "I just had a checkup last week...

...What it is really, though perhaps unconsciously, doing is reshuffling a hoary Hollywood formula to conform to so-called contemporary standards of medium-fast living, and not offend seriously even the most delicate, antiquated sensibilities...

...This is not merely an hommage...

...They might have gone farther and shown us the lovers, on another night, watching Private Lives, for this, too, has heavily influenced the movie...

...part of the time he is still a silly swish of the Franklin Pangborn vintage...

...George Segal is always George Segal, but he is getting to be very good at that...

...They are on their own sexual collision course with problems like a married couple, friends of Steve's, watching and butting in...

...To make it all contemporary and sophisticated, the film must be crowded with marginal sexuality and sexual innuendo...

...During a jolly softball session in Hyde Park, he "meets cute" a divorced Englishwoman, Vicki Allessio, by knocking down her child...

...She is a divorcee working in fashion design, for both of those reasons frankly in need of a man...

...it is the filmmakers' (Melvin Frank also directed) attempt to forestall charges of flagrant derivativeness: their hope that by admitting it, they can get people to call it a variation on a theme...

...And, secondly, can one still make films that are copies of silent comedies...

...With Playtime, Jacques Tati finally becomes what he has long threatened to be: a crashing bore...

...For this film by Melvin Frank and Jack Rose, two old Hollywood hands (sometimes spelled "hacks"), is really a '40s movie where adultery was taboo, and the screenwriters' entire ingenuity, such at it was, was taken up with devising ways to postpone-never mind interrupt?the coitus until 90 minutes of film could elapse and the would-be lovers could part as cute as they met...

...an office building, where Hulot wanders about forever missing the functionary he is looking for...

...here we laugh guiltily like men caught in a brothel hoping that those who caught us will themselves feel too ashamed to snitch...

...But he is also a decent enough, hard-working actor whose face can sustain tricky grimaces for a long time, and is good at rapid or slow dissolves into quite antithetical expressions...

...But we must not stretch middle America's new-found elasticity too far: Steve must go back to his family, the culprits must cleanse their souls with condign freshets of tears, and Vicki must, in a new encounter, refuse another married man...

...Playtime takes place in and among five main locations: the airport, where absurd foreigners arrive as arrogant VIPs or pitifully herded-about tourist groups...

...A cheap film, then, but slickly made, its tired jests about complicated gearshifts (are gearshifts ever that complicated...

...A typical gag has Vicki, trying to cook supper, knock on the door of the hooker upstairs: "Do you have oregano...

...When the couple set up a home away from home in Soho, things must proceed comically yet charmingly just long enough to establish that the two really love each other, that theirs was no casual tumbling into bed...

...and fights over who'll sleep on which side of the bed (do people really fight over such things...

...he has a nice wife, two nice kids, one nice dog, but . . . Anyway, soon he is in Marbella for a week investigating an accident at sea and Vicki is with him...

...And for all this, Tati, in his Hulot persona, is still a sad throwback to Keaton and other silent comedians...

...What soundtrack Playtime has is a sorry hodgepodge^-Snatches of poorly synched polyglot babble indistinctly blown about on the winds of despair...

...A twice-repeated gag has someone open a soulless glass door to reveal in it a reflection of the Eiffel Tower or Sacre Coeur, which the person blithely ignores...

...opening night at a fancy, new-fangled restaurant, where everything-Service, cuisine, the building itself-goes to pieces, but the guests live it up undeterred...

...a dislocated back that temporarily puts Steve out of amatory commission...

...Several other figures crisscrossing the film are equally lackluster, and Barbara Dennek (a bovine German au pair girl whom Tati picked up to play the heroine) looks scarcely good enough for the casting couch, let alone the screen...