I'd be plainly lying if I said this didn't surprise me, and to be frank, disappoint me. The premise is clear and focused; in my opinion the film itself is not. To whatever extent the movie follows terminally ill Katherine, and discreet "cameraman" Roddy, the scope of the storytelling and the ideas within are broader and less precise. 'Death watch' shows us enough of this near-future world to introduce new notions into the narrative, but not enough to truly build out that world or to do anything with those notions. At one point or another we're treated to intimations of a crumbling dystopian society; the death of imagination; foreshadowing of the real-world emergence in recent years of "artificial intelligence" being "substituted" for the "creation" of art; the loss of privacy; what it means to age and die in a world where death from illness is extremely rare, and how the old and infirm are treated; the corruption and greed of television and studio executives; and more.
Moreover, ideas are treated very unevenly in the narrative, and while it definitely reflects poorly on the screenplay, or at least Bertrand Tavernier's realization of it, I can only hope and assume that David G. Compton's novel is more even-handed. Though it hardly seems like a statement made in good faith, Vincent delivers a sage kernel of wisdom, and a theme that this could have latched upon, of making death personal, and making it matter, in a world where the end of life is largely shuffled out of view; this does not meaningfully characterize the plot as it presents, however. It's also very noteworthy that the movie leaves an aspect of the plot wholly unexplained until the last ten to fifteen minutes, and in so doing adds still another element to the tableau that doesn't remotely feel like it's given all due consideration.
But that's still not all, because there's at least as much emphasis in the storytelling on Roddy as on Katherine, and on Roddy's condition as on Katherine's. What comes across isn't that the picture is made more complex for the fact of these two facets, or any comparisons that could be drawn, but simply that Tavernier, or screenwriter David Rayfiel, couldn't find balance or decide what they actually wanted the end product to be. This is especially true in the last act as the course of events come to a head, and as if everything else going on here weren't enough to trouble the viewing experience, here's one more: I love Antoine Duhamel's score in and of itself, a bevy of ponderous musical themes so striking that I'm actually reminded of Georges Delerue's compositions for Andrzej Zulawski's 'L'important c'est d'aimer' - notes so looming in their immensity as to convey feelings of horror in some measure. Yet despite the bleakness of some of those thoughts this broaches in passing, 'Death watch' is most definitely not a horror film, and it doesn't genuinely carry itself as such in any other manner, so the music seems out of place. And all this is to say nothing of dialogue and scene writing that is part and parcel of the scattered cornucopia the feature represents, and cements it, and also amplifies it under a prominent spotlight.
It's an extraordinary cast that was assembled for this piece, and I think they all give terrific performances. The filming locations and production design are equally terrific; the hair and makeup artists did excellent work. I admire Pierre-William Glenn's cinematography. Down to the very last minutes, however, the writing is indistinct and poorly defined, and it really seems like it never fully knows what it wanted to say, be, or do. This was overloaded with a surfeit of potential, a cavalcade of possibilities, and it tries to throw them all in - with the end result that the entirety is given no clear form, or at least, too little of one. I didn't know what I was getting into when I sat to watch, but I had high expectations just based on the names involved. I'm glad for those who get more out of 'Death watch' than I did, but I think it's all too patchy, uneven, and spread thin to amount to much of anything.
Moreover, ideas are treated very unevenly in the narrative, and while it definitely reflects poorly on the screenplay, or at least Bertrand Tavernier's realization of it, I can only hope and assume that David G. Compton's novel is more even-handed. Though it hardly seems like a statement made in good faith, Vincent delivers a sage kernel of wisdom, and a theme that this could have latched upon, of making death personal, and making it matter, in a world where the end of life is largely shuffled out of view; this does not meaningfully characterize the plot as it presents, however. It's also very noteworthy that the movie leaves an aspect of the plot wholly unexplained until the last ten to fifteen minutes, and in so doing adds still another element to the tableau that doesn't remotely feel like it's given all due consideration.
But that's still not all, because there's at least as much emphasis in the storytelling on Roddy as on Katherine, and on Roddy's condition as on Katherine's. What comes across isn't that the picture is made more complex for the fact of these two facets, or any comparisons that could be drawn, but simply that Tavernier, or screenwriter David Rayfiel, couldn't find balance or decide what they actually wanted the end product to be. This is especially true in the last act as the course of events come to a head, and as if everything else going on here weren't enough to trouble the viewing experience, here's one more: I love Antoine Duhamel's score in and of itself, a bevy of ponderous musical themes so striking that I'm actually reminded of Georges Delerue's compositions for Andrzej Zulawski's 'L'important c'est d'aimer' - notes so looming in their immensity as to convey feelings of horror in some measure. Yet despite the bleakness of some of those thoughts this broaches in passing, 'Death watch' is most definitely not a horror film, and it doesn't genuinely carry itself as such in any other manner, so the music seems out of place. And all this is to say nothing of dialogue and scene writing that is part and parcel of the scattered cornucopia the feature represents, and cements it, and also amplifies it under a prominent spotlight.
It's an extraordinary cast that was assembled for this piece, and I think they all give terrific performances. The filming locations and production design are equally terrific; the hair and makeup artists did excellent work. I admire Pierre-William Glenn's cinematography. Down to the very last minutes, however, the writing is indistinct and poorly defined, and it really seems like it never fully knows what it wanted to say, be, or do. This was overloaded with a surfeit of potential, a cavalcade of possibilities, and it tries to throw them all in - with the end result that the entirety is given no clear form, or at least, too little of one. I didn't know what I was getting into when I sat to watch, but I had high expectations just based on the names involved. I'm glad for those who get more out of 'Death watch' than I did, but I think it's all too patchy, uneven, and spread thin to amount to much of anything.