Main Cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Therese Liotard, Max von Sydow
Release Year: 1980
Country: FR/WG
Run Time: 128 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Director Bertrand Tavernier provides an unexpected feminist slant to the otherwise standard sci-fi trappings of Death Watch. Harvey Keitel plays a man of the future who has had a camera implanted in his brain. The mechanism, which is endowed with special X-ray properties, is activated by the user's eyes. Keitel is assigned by ruthless TV producer Harry Dean Stanton to secretly probe the subconscious of a dying woman, played by Romy Schneider. Stanton is only interested in the grim spectacle of what goes on inside the brain of someone who knows she's doomed. Keitel, on the other hand, becomes increasingly compassionate--and disgusted by the tawdriness of his assignment--as he stares into Schneider's tortured psyche. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Helmed by director Bertrand Tavernier, from an English-language script he co-authored with David Rayfiel (adapted from David Compton's 1975 science fiction novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe), Death Watch revamps themes explored by Rayfiel in his screenplay for Lipstick. Both pictures, in their own ways, probe the issues of media voyeurism and contemporary society's male-driven, chauvinistic objectification of women. But whereas Lipstick devolves and regresses into morally reprehensible, exploitative junk, and demonstrates no respect for any of its characters, Death Watch is, in the final analysis, contemplative, sensitive, and humane. For its first 30 minutes, the picture is every bit as uncomfortable as Lipstick, and gives off the same sort of cold creeps; it appears to be headed down an equally sickening path. But the film then takes a sharp and wholly unexpected left turn. Tavernier and Rayfiel make a fascinating, defiantly unpredictable choice regarding the culpability of the main character, Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider), that gives the picture an added level of ethical murkiness, yet the filmmakers skillfully avoid diluting their whopping, deafening slam against the lack of ethos in contemporary television and the mass media's relentless and growing invasion of privacy. Tonally, Rayfiel and Tavernier keep their fingers on the audience's pulse by ultimately bringing Katherine's victimizer, TV network cameraman Roddy (Harvey Keitel) face to face with the sleaziness of his own actions, and having him commit an act of penitence in the film's last third that redeems him to a large degree in the eyes of Katherine and the audience. Less successful, and less credible, is the suddenness of Roddy's transformation -- Keitel seems so devoid of emotion, and so like an automaton during the first hour, that the change is a bit too abrupt; nonetheless, the idea behind his arc, and the trajectory of it (self-liberation from the "machinery" in his head and the process of regaining his own humanity) are both rock solid. Moreover, the film ends on a particularly affirming note for Roddy; Keitel's last line is a stunner. In a pivotal role, Harry Dean Stanton permeates his interpretation of TV network head Vincent Ferriman ("death is the new pornography") with a catatonic sleaziness, and Max von Sydow (as Mortenhoe's ex-husband) does exemplary work in the picture's concluding act. Most impressive, however, is the ill-fated Schneider, who committed suicide three years after the production of this film, following an onslaught of devastating personal tragedies. Still under-recognized, she was always one of the screen's great unsung treasures, and perhaps never moreso than in this, one of her penultimate features. The actress glows throughout, and her evocation of Mortenhoe is so multilayered, and so dazzling, that her real-life fate breaks one's heart. She will be missed. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Caroline Langrishe - Girl in the Bar; Robbie Coltrane; Jake D'Arcy; Vadim Glowna - Harry Graves; Julian Hough; Eva-Maria Meineke - Dr.Klausen; William Russell - Dr.Mason; Jimmy Yuill; Bernhard Wicki - Katherine's Dad; Derek Royle; Billy Riddoch; Paul Young; Peter Kelly; Carey Wilson
Credit
Anthony Pratt - Art Director, Bertrand Tavernier - Co-producer, Judy Moorcraft - Costume Designer, Jean Achache - First Assistant Director, Bertrand Tavernier - Director, Michael Ellis - Editor, Armand Psenny - Editor, Antoine Duhamel - Composer (Music Score), Pierre-Wiliam Glenn - Cinematographer, Louis Wipf - Production Manager, Gabriel Boustiani - Producer, Janine Rubeiz - Producer, Michel Desrois - Sound/Sound Designer, David Rayfiel - Screenwriter, Bertrand Tavernier - Screenwriter, David Compton - Book Author
