Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Hey Model Couple, You're a Bit Like You and Me


William Klein is an American photographer and filmmaker who has been expatriate in France for many decades. Prior to the Eclipse/Criterion release of three of his films, I had only been exposed to his exceptional documentary, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest (not to be confused with The Greatest the bizarre Herbert Muhammad-bank rolled auto biopic where Ali played himself and Ernest Borgnine played Angelo Dundee) and had read a bit about him from time to time in film journals and alike.

The Model Couple (Le Couple témoin) is one of the films in the new Eclipse box. It is a French comedy with an absurdist tick. Jean Michel and Claudette are selected to undergo some kind of experiment/propaganda trick/reality TV show (nearly 25 years or so before Big Brother, the Truman show and EdTV) Their keepers are this round almost mime d makeup woman who reminds me of a cross between Leo McKern in Help! and Lotte Lenya as Rosa Kleb in From Russia With Love.

The film is bright and shiny. Films from France in the seventies and late sixties always seem to have this wonderful sheen to them. Model Couple's look reminds me of the Truffaut films of a few years earlier, especially Bed and Board. Klein takes no prisoners with his assault on consumer culture and psychosociology (as it is called at one point in the film.) His film is stocked with more gags than Woody Allen's Sleeper, of which Model Couple has a similar tone

Model Couple takes on market testing, consumerism, television and the French government. (The last a fairly humorous episode where the minister of the Future comes to dinner.) And the last episode consists of tweenager "terrorists" coming to take over the New City experimental lab, kidnapping or rather adultnapping the model couple with their demands being a chance to be heard "Do you know what's in your television" before powers that be demolish the New CIty Research lab and leave Claudette and Jean Michel stranded.

Model Couple is definitely a product of 1977, but its themes still hold contemporaneously thirty years later.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:38 PM
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