What's your favourite film scene?

The restaurant scene in Playtime.

Now, it's obvious that the sequence works as well as it does because of its context in the entire film, following the expertly realised, unrushed opening half and the relatively brief closing act with its giddy explosion of joy, energy and colour.

But the restaurant scene is a virtuosic feat of filmmaking and, maybe most importantly, comedy. It maintains its frantic pacing over the guts of forty five minutes straight, with the running gags evolving and mutating in delightful ways right through to the very end. Tati establishes and successfully follows dozens of characters and happenings, often within a single frame. It's this glorious mix of chaos and anarchy - the scene grows increasingly frantic as everything falls apart (literally), but at the same time it represents some of the most controlled reels of (70mm) film in history. Tati clearly considered deeply every single thing about it, from the props to the spatial relationships and right down to its deliriously unhinged soundtrack.



That this insanity is maintained over more than a third of the film is nothing short of miraculous. I've watched through it only twice, but both times I was absolutely mesmerised and sat there with a huge grin on my face from beginning to end (and given what follows, said grin stayed there). Playtime is one of the great 'complete' artistic statements of cinema, its creator's definitive masterpiece. And nowhere is that more evident than in that hilarious, crazy, brilliant restaurant scene.