Lessons from the innovation and influence of the film that built a city and bankrupted a visionary.
Editor Vashi Nedmoansky describes Playtime as the “visual blueprint” for contemporary series like Severance and Andor (2022-2025):
Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME built the visual blueprint.
— Vashi Nedomansky, ACE (@vashikoo) June 18, 2026
SEVERANCE made it corporate psychological horror.
ANDOR made it Imperial bureaucracy.
Modern architecture can be comedy, control and alienation all at once.
I plucked some of my favorite shots and designs: pic.twitter.com/hIZNVJVclK
“Jacques Tati invested his life’s savings to build a massive ‘city set’ outside Paris,” Nedmoansky continues. “Built from concrete, glass and steel, it was nicknamed ‘Tativille‘. They shot everything on 65mm film to capture it in all its glory”:
Jacques Tati invested his life's savings to build a massive 'city set' outside Paris. Built from concrete, glass and steel, it was nicknamed "Tativille". They shot everything on 65mm film to capture it in all its glory. pic.twitter.com/y2f8txcVdE
— Vashi Nedomansky, ACE (@vashikoo) June 19, 2026
Scene It asserts that Tati’s “60 year old French flop” has influenced so much cinema in the decades since its release, right up to today:
Further Viewing
Playtime was one of director Greta Gerwig‘s myriad references in Barbie (2023):
We take further lessons from the design of the office space – and many other elements – of Severance (2022-2025):
We take even more lessons from the architecture of oppression and the construction of resistance as portrayed in Andor (2022-2025):