Directed by Bertrant Tavernier (1980) … this low-tech, low-budget sci-fi movie is about a television producer and a man with a camera implant in his brain conspiring to televise the last days of a dying novelist.
NTV television producer, Vincent Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton), claims we’ve become shy about death and that it’s the new pornography. Tavernier’s camera tracks camera-eyes Roddy (Harvey Keitel) who tracks a dying Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider). She’s on the run after duping Ferriman into giving her a bushel of cash for the televised rights of her final days. She has a Robin Hood moment at a ramshackle flea market (one shanty jewel of a location that looks like something Coney Island barfed onto the shore without any rides; does it still exist? #hipcamp). There she pays fat cash for a Cleopatra wig, a disguise prop, she’s told is made of real hair. And what is real in this film?
Roddy’s camera eyes are real. The fact that he can’t sleep – ever – or be exposed to absolute darkness for more than a minute is real, and if he is exposed to darkness, then he’ll go completely blind, and he does in a sacrificial scene that harkens the great Brando’s cry for “Stella!” in Streetcar Named Desire. Keitel as Roddy is a true charmer, and somewhat of a moral enigma; it’s the root of Tavernier’s finger pointing toward us, the real audience of Death Watch. There’s a meta-vibe here that most likely influenced Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 & 2007).
It’s fun to see Harry Dean Stanton play a sleazy producer. He’s got some awesome movie posters on his office wall: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Tall T. This is pre Paris Texas (1984). Harry Dean Stanton is just ramping up into his decades long prime. Stanton’s Vincent Ferriman must’ve inspired David Cronenberg to create James Wood’s infamous sleaze bag TV exec in Videodrome (1984), a film that still excites the third eye and gets the pineal gland humming, whereas Death Watch isn’t a film worth returning to for more sustenance; it’s more like a ride that’s worth taking once.
Death Watch is loaded with a boon of fantastic conceits, more than it can exploit, a co-writing AI Commodore 64 program, Roddy’s sleep deprivation which never really seems to drive him bonkers, a slew of protesters protesting what exactly, kablooey marriages with vague reasonings as to why they blew apart. Is this a problem inherent with novels adapted into films? This one based on The Unsleeping Eye by David G. Compton.
There is a Bernard Herrmannesque soundtrack that has a Hitchcock vibe with melodramatic flourishes that reminds one of Romy Schneider in another brilliant film: Zulawski’s That Most Important Thing: Love [1975]).
Death Watch’s scenery starts in crummy industrial Portside Glasgow, where we see billboards advertising Death Watch. Eventually we follow Katherine and Roddy’s escape into the countryside that’s filled with rolling green hills that’s absolutely refreshing, except for the NTV helicopters roving the sky like Jurassic mosquitoes in search of its dying star (or maybe some unhabitable location for Naked and Afraid Season 42; oh, wait, that’s in the future future of this film.)
Death Watch is seductive viewing when it’s cheating someone out of the later years of their life. Sorry, no hospital-bed octogenarians here, staring at a gloomy window, that kind of death watch would most certainly earn bunk ratings.
But hey, much love to the only senior in the film, Gerald Mortenhoe (Max Von Sydow), Katherine Mortenhoe’s first husband; his revisionist sense of humor is one of the highlights of the film, telling a story of a soldier of fortune turned amateur composer in the 13th century (I’d love to watch that!).
He explains that perhaps not everything’s worthy of being recorded, things like the passing of a cloud, or the chirp of a cricket, or a suppressed belch. Oh, but it is! But. It. Is … Gerald Mortenhoe didn’t see it coming, but Ferriman did, and would’ve been psyched to see the real future currently getting pumped into our brains, doomscrolling ad infinitum. Plus camera eyes are already here! Quest Pro. Vision Pro. UR F’d Pro. There’s simply no time to watch any one person dying.
Demented Flicks 