Original title: La mort en direct
Dedicated to Jacques Tourneur, Bertrand Tavernier’s first English language film – released in the English speaking world as Death Watch – is a brooding science fiction epic set in a superficially idyllic near future where disease has been eradicated and the elderly are farmed out to sterile nursing homes to die drug assisted deaths. It’s a world where death is a national obsession (the nation in question is never identified, though the film was shot in a moody Glasgow and in some of the most picturesque corners of the Scottish Highlands) and where the top rated TV show is Death Watch, a morbid real life soap opera in which the very few rare individuals who are diagnosed as suffering from a terminal illness are pursued by camera crews for the titillation of an insatiable public.
Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider, who died not long after completing La mort en direct), is a successful novelist fighting a losing battle with Harriet, her infuriating plot creating computer, and with a mystery illness that her doctor tells her will kill her and for which there is no known cure. Death Watch’s sleazy producer Vincent Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) approaches Katherine with an offer – he’ll give her a small fortune if she allows her final days to be broadcast on the nightly Death Watch show. Initially, Katherine rejects Ferriman’s offer but soon appears to relent when the media, hungry for sensation, turn her and her illness into cause celebres. However, she plans to dupe the TV station and flee with the money, abandoning her second husband Harry Graves (Vadim Glowna) and heading for the remote home of hubby number one, Gerald (Max Von Sydow).
Sent in pursuit of Katherine is Roddy (Harvey Keitel in a rare sympathetic role), a TV reporter who has a camera implanted in his head and who befriends the fiercely independent and thoughtful Katherine. Images are constantly relayed back to Ferriman’s studio and he greedily exploits the blossoming friendship – love, even – that slowly develops between Roddy and Katherine.
The couple eventually arrive at Gerald’s remote home, but the tragic events that will lead to one of the most downbeat conclusions of any SF film, are already in motion. Throughout the film, Roddy has lived in mortal fear of the dark, prolonged denial of light being capable of destroying his delicate camera implant, leaving him permanently blind. As he begins to realise what it is that he’s caught up in – nothing less than the theft of Katherine’s dignity – an appalled Roddy rushes out onto a darkened beach and discards his flashlight, deliberately blinding himself to deny Ferriman access to Katherine’s final few hours. In the end, both his and Katherine’s self-sacrificing acts (she commits suicide by overdosing on her pills) are rendered meaningless when Ferriman reveals that the ‘illness’ was faked all along (the pills that Katherine had been taking were just to make her feel sick and experience genuine looking pain) and that Katherine had been perfectly healthy all the time.
The world envisaged by Tavernier and his co-writer David Rayfiel, inspired by the novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by David Compton, is a strange and bleak one, where the dream of eradicating illness and disease has been achieved but where people live empty, meaningless lives in abject poverty in graveyards and derelict shanty towns and where machines are employed to replace human imagination. It’s an emotionally sterile place where people have lost touch with what’s really important to the point where they’ll happily gawp at people dying for real on TV and read novels generated by computers named Harriet:
Katherine: Does it make sense to have a machine named Harriet writing novels for us? Are we too exhausted from building you to make up our own stories?
Harriet: Affirmative…
It’s a never-never land, not once identified, yet a richly imagined place all the same, dense with background information and incidental detail. There are mysterious borders where wars are fought and where people can lose their status if they cross (“We’re not legal in this country”); there’s been some kind of major conflict, alluded to by Roddy when he begs the police who have arrested him after a minor riot not to switch off the lights in his cell; the police wear British uniforms, yet there are a multitude of accents and dialects, from broad Scottish to French, via American and Etonian English. It’s a bizarre but effective stew that creates a credible and detailed background that feels genuinely ‘lived in’, unlike many a sterile SF saga where the settings are as clean cut as their heroes and where background ‘characters’ merely drift along apparently locked in aimless social Brownian motion (come in Logan’s Run (1976) and Total Recall (1990), your time is up…)
Performances are uniformly excellent throughout, ranging from Schneider’s melancholy, world-weary Katherine, accepting her ‘fate’ with a resigned dignity, through Stanton’s sleazy, heartless Vincent (admittedly he does lead a ‘rescue’ mission to find Roddy and Katherine after Roddy has blinded himself, but inevitably he does so armed with a fully equipped camera crew), to Keitel’s eminently likeable Roddy, a rare chance for this fine and versatile actor to play someone who isn’t clutching a handgun and firing off verbal obscenities between shoot-outs. He seizes the opportunity with gusto and gives one of the most charming and complex portrayals in his interesting career. His character endures much heartache and suffering, Roddy torn between his duty to Ferriman, his stormy relationship with his estranged wife Tracy (Therese Liotard, another excellent performance) and his growing love and admiration for Katherine, whose zest for life and simple naiveté he comes to covet.
Tavernier’s direction is exemplary, the film unravelling at a carefully measured pace, underpinned by Antoine Dunamel’s sweeping musical score that perfectly complements Tavernier’s beautiful images (lovingly captured by director of photography Pierre William Glenn, whose cameras move with a sinuous fluidity and grace, conjuring stunning widescreen vistas that are inevitably ruined on the small screen) and adds immeasurably to the feeling of intense sadness that permeates the film.
One must be careful not to paint too bleak a picture of La mort en direct, branding it as unwatchable melancholia, as there are many moments of simple hope and joy to be found in Tavernier and Rayfiel’s literate and moving script. Though for much of the film Katherine believes herself to be edging inexorably towards death, she retains a sense of hope and a form of innocence about her that is quite touching. She drifts quietly through a world in a more irreversible state of terminal decline than herself with an almost detached air, much more an observer of human nature and its petty foibles than Roddy. She is an island of serenity and idealism in a world that is too busy licking its mortal wounds to appreciate such simple human qualities.
Neither is the film an overly-studious examination of the human condition and its reaction to impending death, though there’s plenty of that here for those who want it. True, it’s a talkative and contemplative film, but there’s also an element of excitement and action woven through the classy script, as Katherine and Roddy are pursued by the sinister agents of the TV company (played in one scene by Robbie Coltrane). Katherine’s initial dash for freedom in the gaudy chaos of a sprawling, makeshift bazaar is enthralling stuff, as is the emotional finale as Vincent, realising that his manipulations have this time stepped over the mark, races to prevent what was inevitable from the outset – Katherine’s death at her own hands.
What it is, however – and of course there couldn’t possibly have been any grand design in this – is a remarkably prescient look forward to a world obsessed with reality television. In a world bombarded by images of ordinary people doing ordinary things, the prospect of a show as distressing as Death Watch doesn’t seem at all unfeasible any more.
There are those who read the climax as a depressing slap in the face, having both Katherine and Roddy making empty, meaningless gestures of defiance. Yet their actions are both totally justified and understandable – Katherine had already resigned herself to death and the sights that she’d seen on her long, meandering journey had only reinforced her actual desire for death. For the sensitive and creative Katherine, live in this appalling, dying landscape had already become meaningless and her suicide has less to do with her wish to cheat Ferriman of a climax to his show, but for her own escape from a soul-destroying existence. Similarly, Roddy’s almost Oedipal self-mutilation (he is nothing less than the handsome youth who fell in love with his beautiful ‘mother’ figure) is an act of escape, freeing him from the quiet but pervasive tyranny of the TV companies and re-uniting him with his wife.
La mort en direct is, then, a many faceted film, a multi-layered entertainment that presents itself in many guises to be read as desired by the viewer. Its bleakness and inevitable under-currents of morbidity are perhaps unavoidable and did nothing to endear the film to the less discerning onlooker. But those with a fascination for the gloomier side of human existence will find it an endlessly rewarding and strangely uplifting experience. Ironically, given the downbeat ending, it’s also a very optimistic and life affirming film, one that celebrates the basic joys of human existence by examining the painful process of death and bereavement. A powerful and complex film, La mort en direct is one of the finest – if least well known – examples of 80s big screen science fiction.
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