>>18886543I haven't read this whole thread because it's long as fuck, but I ctrl + F'd "Tati" to see if anyone had said this already and I don't think it's been covered.
If anyone's interested, Tati's films (and I'm thinking very specifically of Playtime here) made a lot out of the way his character would interact within a very specific kind of space. In Playtime it's all about modernity and how out of place his character is in sleek office spaces and nuovo-deco 60s areas, or whatever the correct term is for the style they used.
The comedy is generated by his bumbling-old-man character being out of place in the often sterile, impersonal environments, so my interpretation of that particular image would be something to do with conjuring a sense of this isolation and claustrophobia within a large, open space.