Tati’s sense of mod­ernistic detach­ment remind­ed me the like­ly apoc­ryphal tale that John Ford shot The Grapes of Wrath in Arkansas because it looked more like Okla­homa. As a kid, I remem­ber see­ing La Défense from a bus and maybe we stopped there, but if we did I took no pic­tures of it. It felt like Cen­ter City Philadel­phia after 6 p.m. or the Finan­cial Dis­trict or any down­town busi­ness dis­trict for that mat­ter, a place­less place, anony­mous by design, built on an imper­son­al scale, utter­ly unin­hab­it­ed and “cen­tral” to noth­ing in particular.