“Life is full of homages to Jacques Tati” writes Michel Chion, and he’s right. Any time I find myself in an antiseptic public space — be it an airport, an art gallery or an office building — I flash back to the filmmaker’s 1967 masterpiece Playtime (*****; Aug. 2, 7pm) and smile.

An epic nearly 10 years in the making, Playtime was expected to feature plenty of Monsieur Hulot — the elegant bumbler played by Tati in his previous hits Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (July 31, 7pm) and Mon Oncle (Aug. 11, 7pm). But, in a quietly radical move, the director pushed his beloved onscreen alter ego to the edges of the frame, so much so that viewers who came hoping to catch more of the beloved buffoon’s misadventures ended up squinting through an extended game of “Where’s Hulot?” It may have seemed like Tati was ceding the floor, but he was really laying the groundwork for a different kind of farce, one where the sets — among the most elaborate and expensive ever created for a French production — were the stars.

Like no film before or, arguably, since, Playtime is a comedy of precisely delineated space, where the arrangement of bodies and objects is both the background and the substance of the jokes. Tati is frequently cited as an anti-modernist, but to reduce Playtime’s meticulously constructed mise en scène to technophobic critique does the filmmaker a disservice. Far from being a nightmare of mechanized municipality, Tati’s Paris looks more like a utopia with only a few (hundred) little kinks left to work out. No true Luddite could have rendered steel and glass so beautifully.