I’d never seen a Jacques Tati film before I sat down with this disc. I knew the reputation — visionary French comedian, meticulous craftsman, the kind of filmmaker other filmmakers talk about in hushed, reverent tones. None of that prepared me for what Playtime actually is. This isn’t a comedy you watch. It’s a comedy you learn to see.

To understand what Criterion is preserving here, you have to understand what Tati risked. He spent three years building “Tativille,” an entire functioning city set on the outskirts of Paris — complete with working escalators, glass office buildings, and real electrical grids. Production costs exceeded fifteen million francs. The film opened to disastrous box office in 1967 and bankrupted him completely. He lost ownership of his own work. That’s the story behind every frame of this 4K restoration: a man who bet everything on a vision the world wasn’t ready for.

The film itself has barely a plot, and that’s entirely the point. Tati’s signature creation, the perpetually bewildered Monsieur Hulot, wanders through his futuristic steel-and-glass Paris while a group of American tourists circles through the same spaces, occasionally intersecting with him in ways that feel accidental and inevitable at once. Six loosely connected sequences build from sterile airports and identical offices toward a chaotic restaurant opening night that spirals into something close to joy. Tati stages dozens of visual gags simultaneously within the same widescreen frame, layering foreground and background action so densely that every rewatch reveals jokes you missed entirely.

What surprised me most, though, was the sound. Tati recorded Playtime in six-track stereo — in 1967 — and the result is something closer to a musical composition than a soundtrack. Glass doors wheeze. Heels crack against marble. Machines hum and chirp in rhythmic counterpoint. The aggressive, hypnotic sound design turns modern life itself into an instrument, and it’s as much a character in the film as Hulot. This isn’t just a visual feast. Your ears are doing equal work.

Criterion sourced this restoration from a 6.5K scan of the original 65mm camera negative, supplemented by a 1967 internegative and a 2002 interpositive, and the jump from the 2009 Blu-ray (which I’ve had sitting on my shelf, unwatched, shameful!) is dramatic. Tati’s meticulous color palette of greys, silvers, and cool blues comes through with a nuance that’s never been available at home, and the occasional bursts of red and green hit with startling impact even without HDR. The lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 3.0 surround mix, remastered from Tati’s own 1978 70mm 6-track source, is phenomenal.

Supplements carry over from the previous edition: an introduction by Terry Jones, selected-scene commentaries from historian Philip Kemp and Tati expert Stéphane Goudet, the 1967 short Cours du Soir directed by Tati, a visual essay, a behind-the-scenes documentary, and archival audio from Tati’s 1972 San Francisco Film Festival appearance. The packaging recreates the artwork from earlier DVD and Tati collection slimcases — and as Criterion tends to do, it captures the film’s essence with an elegance that makes you want to display it on a shelf.

Playtime demands patience. It rewards curiosity even more generously. This is a film that predicted how alienating modern architecture and consumer culture would become, and it did it while making you laugh. Criterion has given it a presentation worthy of Tati’s insane, bankrupting, magnificent ambition. If you’re a physical media collector and you don’t own this, fix that.