The film Reality just won the Grand Prix at Cannes for its lurid satire on reality television, specifically Grande Fratello, the Italian version of Big Brother. But a far better, more lyrical evisceration of reality television exists. Death Watch was made in Scotland a prescient 32 years ago and stars Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider, Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow and a young Robbie Coltrane.
Keitel plays Roddy, a television journalist who has had an operation to embed a tiny camera in his head, so whatever he sees and hears is beamed live to the studio; an organic nanny-cam. Roddy is assigned to work on the high-rated reality show Death Watch, which tracks the last weeks of young and beautiful people who face certain death. When Katherine (Romy Schneider) is diagnosed with a fatal illness, Roddy befriends her as she tries to run from the paparazzi and a £600,000 contract to film her decline. Katherine trusts Roddy: she has no idea that the man is the camera.
I’d only seen Bertrand Tavernier’s film on grainy secondhand video before, and this digitally remastered version for the big screen is a revelation: the streets of Glasgow are a post-apocalyptic wasteland of fallen tenements and new concrete; the Seventies’ rust shagpile carpet glows; and orange and green Corporation buses are beacons in the grey streets. When Roddy and Katherine run away to hide in an isolated fisherman’s hut on the coast of Kintyre, the landscapes soften into exquisite watery pastels.
The ambiguous relationship between Roddy and Katherine shifts from predator to victim, watcher to watched, and as their relationship deepens, the shame of the deception becomes an impossibly heavy burden. The fact that Schneider died two years after making the film makes her open, pained and puzzled performance all the more hard to bear. Yet she is also a feisty foil to the charms of Keitel, who could talk his way into anything. The fact that you barely question the presence of a camera in his brain attests to his convincing character.
Being French, Tavernier saw Glasgow differently from its natives, and he makes wonderful use of the gothic Necropolis, sandstone pillared terraces and Victorian grandeur. The American television company’s offices are filmed up the grand marbled and panelled staircases of the City Chambers. Here, Harry Dean Stanton lurks as the smiling Machiavellian director, manipulating and deceiving everyone in his path for higher ratings. “We have 71 per cent audience share, and 37 per cent find it offensive but stay with us because it’s real,” he says cheerfully. He tells Katherine: “You’re about to become a celebrity.”
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All round Glasgow, huge billboards appear with Katherine’s face on them: “Death Watch — Television did not really exist before. Watch this space.”
In supermarkets and pubs, shoppers are glued to the screens, tearfully compelled. And while the film was supposed to be science fiction, it now looks like retro hard fact. Particularly in a country that watched Jade Goody on Big Brother, until her untimely death. Bertrand Tavernier, 12A (124min)