[A favourite] colour: grey*

 

Approaching the 60s, Mr Hulot finally switches from black-and-white to colour. Suddenly, we see that his suit is a beigeish grey and so is the Arpels' house, that modernist masterpiece designed by Tati. The beloved luddite struggles with hypermodern people and their hypermodern constructs, much alike the future Hulot from Playtime (1967).

– A house like yours must be such a job! – Oh, a leaf! Ah, yes it's a chore. – Admit it, you love it.

In similar absurd fashion, Guadalupe Acedo, cleaning lady, works her way through Rem Koolhaas' Maison à Bordeaux (1998) in Bêka and Lemoine's Koolhaas Houselife (2008). Too steep are the stairs, too leaky everything else. Levelheaded, she does her thing; a small beacon of romantic practicality in a world of absurd efficiency.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

An actor, director or character named Anthony for National Anthony Day (USA).

“Everything comes from the Great Book of Nature. Human attainments are an already printed book.”

– Antoni Gaudí

“Yes, I'm afraid of death… but for a humble secret agent that's a fact of life, like whisky. And I've drunk that all my life.”

– Lemmy Caution

Science fiction, of course, doesn't have to be driven by grandes effects, by superstar names and monumental backdrops. It can be cool, dry, colourless even. The hero, in trenchcoat and fedora, traverses a lightless city. There are few others at this time of night. The familiar landmarks of the City of Light become the voice of 𝛼-60, an artificial intelligence that presides over Alphaville.

𝛼-60: “Do you know what illuminates the night?”

Lemmy Caution: “Poetry.”

– 𝛼-60 playing the imitation game with Lemmy Caution

Based on a poem by Paul Éluard, #Godard's Alphaville bears similarities with Jean #Cocteau's Orphée (1950), transported to a mirror world of sorts. It also foreshadows not only our time, but also M. Hulot's, whose #Tativille could be the simulacra of 𝛼-60's simulated, dehumanised world.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

“All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.”

– Uncle Max

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.

Rome's EUR was Italy's site for the 1942 World's Fair, and meant as a showcase for #Mussolini's then-20 year old fascist state. Due to the outbreak of World War 2, EUR was never used for the Fair. Instead, the Italian Republic restored the project after the war and – quite appropriately if I may say so – turned it into a business district.

“Your new society sounds charming.”

– Dr. Robert Morgan

An idealised, hypermodern interpretation of Classical Roman architecture, EUR feels alien and inhumane and serves as a perfect backdrop for the events a last man on earth may come up against.

 

Besides in The Last Man on Earth, EUR makes an appearance in Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), Bertolucci's Il conformista (1970), Antonio Pietrangeli's Io la conoscevo bene (1965), and Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect (1987).

Never was or will I be a fan of Jacques #Tati, the loveable Luddite who wouldn't be as big as he became if it wasn't for the technological wonders of the 20th century. Having said that, his Playtime (1967) holds a special place in my heart.

 

Tati's alter ego Monsieur Hulot roams a hyper-modern #Paris, actually an enormous soundstage dubbed Tativille. People, buildings and gadgets interact with and against each other, each and everyone as plotless as a prop. In unison, it becomes a perfectly orchestrated symphony of maddening modernism.

 

But Tati wouldn't be Tati if it wasn't for a glimpse of quiet nostalgia. A woman holding the glass-and-steel entrance door of yet another concrete office building. In the glass, a burst of warm light and colour and movement. And then it's gone, and we remember how that tower once was the thorn in the Luddite's eye, that “baroque and mercantile fancy of a builder of machines”.

 

I'm going to take Mr Ebert's words to heart for my long overdue revisit to #Tativille:

”'Playtime' is a peculiar, mysterious, magical film. Perhaps you should see it as a preparation for seeing it; the first time won't quite work.”

– Roger Ebert