|
Clouzot's Le Corbeau for the introduction of Glasgow out of a graveyard, Powell's Peeping Tom for the rest. "All this technology, but it still comes down to the basics, doesn't it?" New age, "new pornography," the broadcasting of dying patients, an audience favorite. The latest subject is a novelist (Romy Schneider) given a bogus terminal prognosis and a bogus companion, the insomniac (Harvey Keitel) with secret recorders installed in his retina. She escapes in a virtuoso Steadicam hurdle through a dockside fairground, the bionic eye by her side televises her intimate conversations until darkness encroaches. A stringent satire of television via British futurism, Bertrand Tavernier's Fahrenheit 453 in other words. "Everything is of interest yet nothing matters," as Wilde would say of this commoditized voyeurism, espoused by the network sleaze (Harry Dean Stanton) with a poster of Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes in his office. The audience's appetite for suffering, the professional ready to forgo humanity for a good shot, thus ocular monitors that burn out in a tale of corrupted vision. ("The ultimate adventure" callously hawked on billboards turns out to be the reality show.) Crumbling tenements, church shelters, an overcast industrial landscape and yet Tavernier has Keitel open a door and stand on a cabin porch for a sudden Fordian view of the Mull of Kintyre. Judicious use of the subjective camera is the thing for the detached observer, "a certain amount of involvement" complicates matters. At the end of the road waits the estranged aesthete endowed with Max von Sydow's gravitas, contemplating a heroine opting out of a system of businesslike vampirism. Ten years later on the cusp of a different decade, Wenders picks up the line of thought with Until the End of the World. With Thérèse Liotard, William Russell, Vadim Glowna, Bernhard Wicki, Eva Maria Meineke, and Robbie Coltrane.
--- Fernando F. Croce |