La MORT EN DIRECT

(vt Death Watch)

   Film (1979). Selta Film/Little Bear/Sara Film/Gaumont/Antenne 2/TV 15. Coprod and dir Bernard Tavernier, starring Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max Von Sydow. Screenplay David Rayfiel, Tavernier, based on The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; vt The Unsleeping Eye) by D.G. COMPTON. 130 mins. Colour.

   This French/West German coproduction chose, perhaps eccentrically, to locate its DYSTOPIAN city of the future in Glasgow, and the film was shot in English. In a bored NEAR FUTURE where illness has been almost eradicated, death has an obscene fascination. A tv station, keen to broadcast a real-life soap opera, sends cameraman Roddy (Keitel) to film, without her knowledge, the last days of Katherine (Schneider), who helps computers write romantic novels and who is dying of a rare disease; this is achieved by surgically implanting in his skull a camera that operates through his eyes. The evocation of the future is perfunctory: just a dash of urban blight. Attention is tremulously on the morbid relationship of invalid and cameraman. He blinds himself; she (who, we and she discover, is not really dying at all) commits suicide. As an attack on MEDIA invasion of privacy - a popular subject in sociological sf - this suffers from morbid overkill, itself reminiscent of soap opera.

   PN