Death Watch

The 1980 English-language debut of French director Bertrand Tavernier is a sci-fi film that anticipates the most exploitative dimensions of reality TV while taking a thoughtful, introspective approach. Romy Schneider stars as Katherine Mortenhoe, a bestselling author diagnosed with an incurable disease, and Harvey Keitel costars as Roddy, a TV cameraman who undergoes experimental surgery to have a camera implanted in his head, with his eye as the lens. Based on D.G. Compton's 1974 novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, the story serves up a rumination on privacy, intimacy, and voyeurism, with Katherine escaping the media spotlight to live her final days in peace and Roddy tagging along, connecting with her personally while (unbeknownst to her) sharing her intimate moments with a TV audience hungry for some kind of emotional connection in a decaying society. Sci-fi in concept but art house in execution, Death Watch is an interesting and at times moving contribution to the cinema about a dystopian future, but it's also long and slow and caught up in the kinds of philosophical contemplations and intellectual conversations that have become a cliché of self-important European filmmaking. Harry Dean Stanton is Keitel's boss, determined to get Katherine's story onscreen at all costs, while Max von Sydow is also on hand as a self-exiled artist. Optional. (S. Axmaker)