Armaguedon (1977)
Directed by Alain Jessua

Film Review

With Armaguedon, a slick thriller in the Henri Verneuil mould, director Alain Jessua further delevops a theme that he had toyed with in his earlier film, Jeu de massacre (1967), namely the distorting effect that today's mass media have begun to exert on an individual's experience of reality.  Made twenty years before 'reality TV' began to take off and radically altered the viewing habits, if not the behaviour and moral faculties, of large swathes of the population, Armaguedon is an eerily prescient film and, in common with most of Jessua's idiosyncratic oeuvre, shows us a world which was only a grim prospect at the time it was made but which has now become a grim reality.

The main protagonist in the film is a type that is now nauseatingly familiar, a pathetic non-entity who will do anything to secure his fifteen minutes of fame.  Unfortunately, Big Brother and The X Factor hadn't yet been invented yet, so this fame-hungry saddo has to resort to more traditional means of drawing attention to himself, i.e. hijacking a pan-European television network so that his threats to blow up the audience of a live TV show get maximum coverage.  As any career terrorist will tell you, fear is the surest way to get people to listen to you, and by playing the fear card for all it is worth our wannabe celebrity achieves his objective - and it's to his credit that he does so without dropping his trousers, putting on a silly animal outfit or massacring a single song.  Of course, we'd expect nothing less of an actor of Jean Yanne's calibre.

Renowned for his darkly ambiguous character portrayals, Yanne is a perfect choice for the lead role, and whilst the character is by no means a saint (evidenced by the cold way he arranges a gruesome murder of two young people) he has little difficulty engaging our sympathies.  Here Yanne resembles the lugubrious suspected killer he previously played in Claude Chabrol's Que la bête meure (1969), a clearly nasty individual but one that we have great difficulty condemning.  The fact that he needs fame so badly bears witness to the tragic vacuity of his life, and the coldly mechanical way in which the police seek to capture him confers on him a certain nobility.  His role is that of a sacrificial victim for a society that thrives on cheap thrills and lurid sensationalism.  It's basically a precursor of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!

For Alain Jessua, the making of Armaguedon was a far from happy experience, owing primarily to his strained working relationship with his second lead actor, Alain Delon.  The two had worked together successfully on Jessua's earlier film Traitement de choc (1973), but their second collaboration was far from harmonious, with actor and director having very different views as to how Delon's character, a psychiatrist lending his support to a police investigation, should be played.  The intense mind duel envisaged by Jessua scarcely made it to the screen.  In the end, Delon's bland characterisation is almost completely eclipsed by Michel Duchaussoy's more humane and convincing portrayal of a dogged police inspector.  Duchaussoy had excelled in Jessua's Jeu de massacre and here he gives great value in a modest but beautifully formed supporting role.  The other actor of note is Renato Salvatori, who brings a subtle pathos to his portrayal of Yanne's autistic sidekick.  Despite having two cultural heavyweights in the main roles, Armaguedon was not a commercial success and remains one of Alain Delon's most neglected films.  Watching the film today, it is shocking to see how pertinent it now is.  What must have seemed like morbid speculation back in 1977 is now an all too real phenomenon.  In these apocalyptic times, everyone, it seems, is either a fame junkie or a decidedly sick voyeur...

Film Synopsis

After the death of his brother, 40-something Louis Carrier suddenly finds himself a very wealthy man.  He gives up his job and devotes himself to a carefully conceived plan to make himself famous.  With the help of his faithful but retarded accomplice Einstein, Carrier begins by getting himself noticed at various high-profile events across Europe.  He then sends recorded messages to the police in several countries, threatening to carry out a terrorist act in the near future.  Fearing the worst, the police turn to an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Michel Ambroise, in an attempt to understand Carrier's motives and discover a means to capture him before he carries out his desperate act...