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You won't be disappointed!

the audience applauded

Memorable, crazy movie

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Great cast and a great idea but ultimately doesn't do the job. In a future that looks like 1979 Scotland, a TV show wants to chronicle a dying woman's final days because death is now rare among all but the elderly thanks to modern medicine (we used to have faith in that). Besides the eye cameras in Harvey Kietel's eyes and a computer the heroine uses to co-write trashy novels, not much of the future is seen on screen. Why is a French director filming in the UK with American & Austrian leads? The film takes it's sweet time, basically the first half to get to Kietel filming the woman as she goes on the run. The idea is ahead of it's time with reality TV and media manipulation. But the pace is slow, the visuals bleak and colorless. The conclusion wasn't satisfying to me at all. A misfire.

If Harvey Keitel with camera eyes doesn't creep you out, then the concept of "deathwatching", a reality show premise if there ever was one, certainly will. This prescient film certainly seems to foretell the advent of TV exploitation of personal identity, complete with a team of producers manipulating events to wring the most dramatic scenes out of its victims. You could argue that Katherine signed off on it, as all of today's reality-show contestants do, but we're not seeing the most watchable scenes as we do on a reality show, instead this film shows long, boring stretches of time, self-reflection, bickering, and routine mundane details such as sleeping in a hostel or riding on a bus, intended to convey a sense of impending doom I suppose. At one point Keitel is wracked with guilt at betraying Katherine's trust, but by that point it seems rather disingenuous and artificial. Max von Sydow is wonderful, as he is in everything he does, and here he makes the most of a small but important role as he tries to give Katherine some dignity. All in all, the film doesn't go deeply enough into the characters for me to care about any of them.

SPOILERS!I was shown this film in a course called "Modernism & Modernity" in the Cinema Dep't at Binghamton University back in 1986 and have never forgotten it (thank you Prof. Walsh). I have gone on to use it in my own Media Studies high school class, for it is perhaps even a more relevant critique of a celebrity and "reality" obsessed screen culture today than it was when it was released in 1980. It also serves as a fine example of how the genre of science fiction need not rely on "futuristic" expensive locations and effects, for it is incredibly location-driven and the bleakness of the Scotland it was filmed in reflects its interior contemplations on the "progress" of humanity via technology. (In these ways, it reminds me of the recent "Children of Men" by Alfonso Cuaron.)The idea of video cameras being implanted in someone's eyes is brilliant and full of narrative possibilities. And unavoidable for us it seems. The portrayal of the reality TV show producer as being callous and only interested in ratings - with his firm belief that everyone/viewers have a "right to know" pushes the story into the opposites: "If everything is of interest, nothing is important", says the dying woman in a society where there is no natural death.Sight as knowing and the eyes as technology opens up many theoretical discussions, especially because of the Oedipal-like scene where Roddy blinds himself for "knowing" too much.... for his shame in that knowing, as if sight gives you knowledge. (Yet as Hitchcock showed us again and again, sight is unreliable.) Reading in another user's comment that the original film's story had Katherine's death a falsity set up by the producers in order to set their show in motion made me gasp, for that makes all of the film's meanings even more powerful and painful. Wow.This film may very well be the most memorable film I have ever seen and, yes, I agree with all the other comment-writers that it should indeed be brought into the light of day (WITHOUT "remaking" it!!!!!)

This was listed on a commercial station (55- in NYC- thank you!) and wasplayed with mercifully few breaks. Still! An amazing, timely, quite profound and haunting movie. As mentioned elsewhere it is a bit ponderous and doesmeander, but the best moments are gorgeous. Spoiler?: (Harvey catching sightof the intimate moments he's filmed in a grocery store and realizing the betrayal of trust he has engineered.) The brief soliloquoy by Max Von Sydow on the lack of 'meaning' in life- which somehow is comforting! The version that another commentor mentions wherein Romy (and without youother cineastes I wouldn't know that this was Romy's last film- what a waste!) is not dying- is just being set up- that would make perfect sense. Harry Dean is fabulous- why doesn't he work more? Please consider upping the rating of this.