The "Delirious" Future Is Now
As companies like Nielsen continue trying various devices to measure viewership in nanoseconds, Internet marketers persistently experiment with different eye-tracking techniques, and the parameters of predictive analytics and focus groups keep evolving, it's intriguing to take another look at a film that effectively predicted many of these trends. (Or, for that matter, to take a look at any film besides Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Diminishing Returns.)
I'm thinking of Le Couple Témoin (The Model Couple), part of The Delirious Fictions of William Klein DVD box set recently released by the Criterion Collection's Eclipse label. Made in 1977, the film not only predicts the likes of EdTV, The Truman Show, and the apparently never-ending tidal wave of reality television, but it does so in a savagely satirical fashion--the kind of satire that, seen again at a remove of thirty-plus years, finds your knowing laughter suddenly turning uneasy.
The film posits an experiment by France's "Ministry of the Future," wherein a pair of "normal," middle-class citizens (played by André Dussolier and Anémone) are placed in an ultra-modern apartment for six months, with every word, act, and emotion being monitored, recorded, and occasionally transmitted to a breathless public.
Though under constant orders to "act naturally," the couple is continuously hounded by a pair of psycho-sociologists (played by Jacques Boudet and an impressively imperious actress known as Zouc), who work out their own frustrations at their career choices by bullying the couple into making choices they may not normally have made (one classic scene finds the couple confusedly trying to come up with the right answer to what degree of "happiness" they usually find themselves, while another finds them trying to please their overseers by improvising a fight--which of course quickly escalates into the real thing).
Those scenes, as well as other key episodes where the hapless couple withstands hysterical vendors touting their wares and a supermarket-set scene where the pair is browbeaten into choosing a particular detergent--only to be relentlessly quizzed on why they finally chose that one--underscore the very real problems implicit in trying to measure why someone "really" behaves in a particular way under a particularly unreal set of circumstances. The Ministry of the Future wants to create a consumer-centric utopia for its people, or so it says; ultimately, once the TV audience has moved on, it rather unceremoniously dumps the couple back on the street, ending the film on a note that's unsatisfactory for a number of reasons--though one has the sneaky suspicion that the choice was deliberate on Klein's part.
None of the lessons in Le Couple Témoin are likely to surprise marketing professionals, just as none of the jabs in Network would probably give today's TV executive pause. That's not to say that the refresher courses offered by both aren't worth taking.
Also included in The Delirious Fictions are probably Klein's most famous fiction film, 1966's Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a bright-eyed send-up of the fashion world where Klein once worked as a top photographer (and including a surreally monstrous version of Diana Vreeland that practically puts Meryl Streep's Anna Wintour manqué to shame), and 1969's rather unfortunate political satire Mr. Freedom, where the jut-jawed title character (a marvelous, where-is-he-now John Abbey) does battle against the likes of Moujik Man and Red China Man under the orders of an LBJ-esque Donald Pleasence. Brandishing a sledgehammer style of wit and a budget of at least $40,000, Mr. Freedom does have some valid ideas about American imperialism that could be relevant today, if it didn't look and feel like a politically excitable film student's attempt to be Jean-Luc Godard.
Still, there are at least bits to be admired in all three works, especially Le Couple Témoin; these are films that have no shortage of ideas worth thinking about. And just because it's summer doesn't mean you have to spend all your time with Sex and the City or Kung Fu Panda.
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