The city rears up around us, lit windows against the night, the corporate buildings blocking the sky. In an all-white empty office, a hedge-fund manager plays a lonesome trumpet. A skittering drum kicks in, adding an urgent pulse. The pulse is money: capital at work. Ranks of computers and servers churn the numbers in a sub-basement world where the capital flows.
In an auction room, prices are spiralling. Actor James Franco, playing an art adviser, explains how art has become a hedge against money's instability. The price of art has nothing to do with the art itself. In another scene, auctioneer Simon de Pury explains the exponential rise of the art market since the 2008 financial crash. Superstitious, he always eats an apple for good luck before working the auction room with his gavel and his wit. And after an auction, he's always depressed. In Dubai, an isolated Filipina woman, who came here to work as a maid, dusts a desk and stands in an empty desert, a world away from where she sends her money home.
Trading-room floors, offices and galleries and auction rooms; the desert, Iceland's lava fields and steaming vents and an artist's abandoned fantasy home are the settings in Playtime, Isaac Julien's new seven-screen film installation. Playtime's title is borrowed from Jacques Tati's 1967 movie, and like Tati's film moves through a series of interconnected stories. While the original Playtime had Monsieur Hulot as its hapless protagonist, here capital is the star, the thread that runs through everything. You can't see it but you know it's there. Capital is the ultimate MacGuffin.
Is capital real? Are these people real? De Pury plays himself, but his eager interviewer is a reporter played by Chinese actress Maggie Cheung, who was also in Julien's 2010 Ten Thousand Waves, currently being shown in MoMA's atrium in New York. Julien's art, too, is implicated in the game of capital. It's the unseen director of all our lives.
British actor Colin Salmon plays the musical hedge-fund manager, while the Filipina worker is Mercedes Cabral, a rising star in Philippine cinema. Cabral is magnificent, and utterly believable when she tells her story, except when she stands on a sand dune looking into emptiness. De Pury too is convincing, but he's playing himself. Being an auctioneer is already a kind of act and conviction is part of the deal. Art dealers and advisers are actors too. Someone's got to keep a straight face about the prices they charge.
There is brilliance and disappointment in Playtime. A hybrid of fiction and documentary, the film makes it difficult to know what is real. I wander between the screens, lost in Julien's cinematic subterfuge, and that, I think, is the point. Unlike the montaged films of Adam Curtis, there's no narration, and the stories must tell themselves. The range of settings – sharp-edged offices in London and Dubai, a crumbling modern fantasy home between mountains and sea in Iceland – add to the sense of dislocation of the modern world. Playtime's visual pleasures sometimes overwhelm the material. Playtime is very long, and the longeurs feel even longer.
There are great moments and moments when believability is lost. The Icelandic artist who wanders his former home, trudging up and down stairs like a figure in one of MC Escher's impossible optical and architectural conundrums and posing against the light, feels too stagey. Playtime, I think, wants to be too many things. But that is also the measure of Julien's ambition. "I come from cinema; it's cinema I'm quoting from and cinema I reappropriate," he says in a new book, Riot, which, like his film installations, is a kind of montage.
A mix of essays and autobiography, filmography and friendships, the book charts his development over the past three decades, since he was a student at St Martin's School of Art in the early 80s, which is where we first met. "As much as I work to disentangle myself from genre, cinema remains my home and my reference," he says, though it seems to me that his work is marked by its multiple entanglements in cinematic narrative and art installation, intellectual preoccupations and intuition, and the demands his subject matter make on the things he does. Although much of his early work was driven by a commitment to developing a queer, black, radical cinema, it has also been marked by a lush, poetic, visual and visceral sense of drama and political engagement. Playtime is like a big, baggy novel. It could do with being tighter, and I keep wanting to wrestle it into a more coherent shape.
Downstairs at Victoria Miro, a pendant two-screen work, Kapital, provides a primer to Playtime. Its central focus is a conversation between the film-maker and the Marxist academic David Harvey before an invited audience at the Hayward's Wide Open School, held a couple of years ago. Harvey explains that capital is like gravity: you can't see it, but you know its there.
A CEO at Goldman Sachs was once asked what it was he did, Harvey recalls. "God's work," the CEO replied. Capital, says Harvey, is a social relation. And social relations are what Julien is trying to depict in Playtime, even when the relations he depicts are, on a human level, atomised and alienated by capital itself.
Over at Victoria Miro's second gallery in Mayfair, a screen in the window projects Enigma, a short, looped film that can be watched from the street. In this time-lapse view of the city of Dubai, filmed over 24 hours, the city fizzes and flares with pulsing light and energy, the glow of capital seen from above. It is a God's-eye view of an enigma. Maybe the film-maker's job is to unravel it, though it seems an impossible task. But try we must.
