La Mort en direct (1980)
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier

Film Review

In 1980, the year in which Bertrand Tavernier's film Death Watch (a.k.a. La Mort en direct), was released, the phrase 'reality television' hadn't yet been coined.  It wasn't until a full decade later that the genre took off, with crowd-pulling shows like Survivor and Big Brother.  Now of course Reality TV is endemic, filling up television schedules every day of the week and providing cheap vicarious thrills for audiences who obviously delight in watching ordinary Joes and Jills making complete prats of themselves on prime time TV.  Based on David Compton's novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, Tavernier's film (and some others made around this time, notably Yves Boisset's Le Prix du danger (1983)) anticipated the emergence of this new form of mass entertainment and tentatively lifted the lid on the host of moral issues it raises.

Death Watch was Bertrand Tavernier's fifth feature and, more significantly, the first of his English language films.  The film was shot in Scotland, an ideal location as it provides the contrasting settings for its two halves - first the scenes of post-industrial decline mirroring society's irreversible moral decay (filmed on the depressing urban wastes on the outskirts of Glasgow) and then the stunning natural splendour of the Scottish countryside.  Tavernier's cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn achieves the greatest visual impact from these two starkly different settings but somehow he also manages to endow them both with the same unrelenting aura of repression and melancholy.  It is the film's eerily oppressive ambiance that gives it its distinctive feel, presenting us with a world that is similar to our own and yet oddly different.  It is so easy to believe this is how the world will be within a few years, a soulless wilderness in which human beings are losing their capacity to feel and show real emotion, the result of technological progress assisting and accelerating society's moral degeneration towards the abyss.

Worthy film though it is, the impact of Death Watch is somewhat diminished by Tavernier's penchant for overly grandiose mise-en-scène, which renders parts of the film absurdly operatic.  Offsetting these unnecessary directorial grandeurs are exemplary performances from two of the most compelling screen actors of the day, Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel, both of whom were having to cope with severe professional and personal difficulties at the time.  (Both had good reason to resent media intrusion in their lives.)  It's hard to imagine two more contrasting actors - Keitel was the keenest advocate of the Method, Schneider a purely instinctive performer.  This, together with the fact that they reportedly had a strained working relationship, makes their on-screen rapport all the more brittle and poignant.  Defying a script that is too wordy and intellectual by half, both actors bring an extraordinary reality to their performances.  Their characters' on-going love-hate conflict, which ultimately attains the proportions of a Greek tragedy, brings home the terrifying destructive power that the media has over us, manipulating and controlling us like puppets for its dubious, if not downright evil, ends.

One of the reasons why Death Watch makes such uncomfortable viewing is that, in addition to foreseeing the dismal decline in television tastes it also spookily presages the untimely demise of its lead actress.  The scene in which William Russell bluntly tells Romy Schneider she will soon die can hardly fail to send a shiver down the spine.  At the time she made this film, the actress was at her most powerful, a vigorous performer and a picture of charm and vitality.  Yet within just over two years she would appear to age ten years through a series of terrible personal disasters (including the violent death of her young son, who incidentally appears briefly in the film) and then die suddenly from a heart attack, in circumstances that still haven't been fully elucidated.  There's a striking similarity (too horrible to dwell on) between the fate of the actress and that of the character she portrays in Tavernier's film, and this is the one aspect of the film that makes it so incredibly difficult to watch.

An outspoken polemicist with deep convictions, Bertrand Tavernier has never been one to shy away from bleak and controversial subjects but Death Watch is by far his darkest and most disturbing film - perhaps even more so today now that its grimly speculative vision of the future has become a near certainty.  Not only does it foresee the rise of Reality TV, and the depths to which it will inevitably sink (with death becoming the 'new pornography' once the mystique of sex has become completely eradicated), it serves as a cautionary tale on the power of the media to control people's lives and shape our reality for its own profit - in a way that is highly corrosive to individuals (those who watch and participate) and society in general.  The vision that Tavernier conjures up is a sorry future in which personal privacy has been completely abolished through the omnipresence of the camera and where just about anything goes for media executives hooked on the goal of achieving ever greater profits.  Of course this warped vision is no longer the stuff of science fiction but a terrible fact of life.  Three decades on, we are now living with the reality of Death Watch, and the most worrying thing about it is that we hardly seem to mind.

Film Synopsis

Mindful of the need to drive up his network's viewing figures, television producer Vincent Ferriman has devised a new reality TV show named Death Watch in which he will beam into people's homes the last days of a terminally ill person.  The subject he selects must obviously be young and good-looking, preferably female, so he opts for Katherine Mortenhoe, a famous writer in her mid-thirties.  Katherine can hardly believe her doctor when he tells her she has contracted an incurable disease.  How can such a thing be possible in an age when virtually all illnesses have been eradicated?  The writer barely has time for this news to sink in before Vincent makes his move and tries to sign her up for his television show.  Appalled by the very idea of having her death filmed for entertainment, Katherine rejects the producer's offer and takes flight, heading for the rundown outer precincts of the city.

In a scene of dismal urban decay, Katherine passes herself off as a vagrant and encounters a sympathetic man of her own age named Roddy.  They strike up an immediate friendship and continue their journey together.  Unbeknown to Katherine, Roddy is in the employ of Vincent Ferriman and has a camera implanted in his brain which allows him to relay everything he sees to television sets across the land.  Confident that she has managed to outwit Ferriman, Katherine undertakes a long journey across country to the remote house of her ex-husband, Gerald.  When Roddy catches a glimpse of Katherine's Death Watch experiences on television he is so disgusted that he has no choice but to confront the writer with the truth.  No sooner has Katherine opened her heart to her understanding former spouse than she receives a telephone call from NTV to notify her that she has been the victim of a cruel deception...