Death Watch (La Mort En Direct)

Bertrand Tavernier, France/West Germany 1979, 128 minutes

Prolific French director Bertrand Tavernier likes to make all sorts of movies - just compare, say, the action-adventure romp D'artagnans Daughter, with the noir-inflected bio-pic Round Midnight, or A Sunday in the Country. Here, he turns his hand to the sci-fi genre, adapting the novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe.

For once, it's a future film which isn't set in Los Angeles or America. Rather, it's Glasgow. The chief difference between Death Watch's future and our present is that most diseases have been conquered by medical science. (This being Glasgow, that must have been a challenge!) Consequently, when someone - like Katherine (Romy Schneider) - has a terminal illness it's newsworthy. The future society, like our own, is still fixated on death as entertainment. TV producer Vincent Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) thus sees a perfect opportunity to boost the ratings, and assigns Roddy (Harvey Keitel - does this man ever sleep?) to cover Katherine's last days. Roddy follows Katherine around, relaying pictures of her back to the TV station through a video camera implanted into his head (cool!). Gradually, Roddy starts to fall for Katherine...

Death Watch, then, obviously shares a number of themes with the other visions of the future we're showing, particularly Strange Days. There's the same fascination with the surveillance and voyeuristic potential of technology, and the reflections upon the nature of the entertainment industry. Again, Peeping Tom is an obvious filmic reference point, combined here with Network. But, unlike 12 Monkeys, Terminator or Strange Days, Death Watch is that much more low key - here only the fate of a few individuals, not the world, is at stake and realistic, as opposed to hyper-realistic, visuals are the order of the day.

"A compelling drama... a harsh indictment of the media's role in society" - Variety

Review by Keith Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97