Peacock

The moustachioed “Matthias” (Albrecht Schuch) works for a business that rents him out. Not for sex, but for just about everything else and he’s good at it. From a companion at a posh concert to a gay lover to a gent who pretends to be a son so he can help his “dad” get to be president of his golf club, he can turn his hand to most things with aplomb. Except, that is, in his perfectly styled home where he and girlfriend “Sophia” (Julia Franz Richter) are having troubles. She is fed up with the mundane sterility of their life and with him becoming more and more subsumed by his vocation. When she finally ups sticks, she leaves him having to deal with quite an existential crisis that causes him to completely reevaluate his life. What isn’t helping is the disgruntled husband of one of his “assignments” as he - “Johann” (Branko Samarovski) - is looking for his own pound of flesh and is no mean umbrella wielder! Perhaps a rural retreat might help? Well there he reunites with “Ina” (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø) whom he met on a previous job and who seems to take the same approach to the meditation lawn as he does (and probably we do, too!). In the end, though, his ordered life has been thoroughly upset and as his last and biggest task looms, maybe “Matthias” is facing his Waterloo? Some of the dialogue here is genuinely funny as the scenarios poke collective fun at pomposity, stupidity and at so much of society’s other, snobbish and preposterous, emperor’s new clothes attitudes. Schuch manages to keep a straight face throughout much of this and that - and as we come to the film’s coup de grâce, is actually quite an achievement. It’s a successful spoof of cinema genres across the board as well as one on human behaviour and I’m no dog lover, so that bit worked for me too! This is good fun.

In this age of increasingly untrustworthy AI, rampant fake news and unabashedly self-serving social media, it’s becoming ever more difficult for many of us to distinguish what’s “real” and what isn’t these days, almost as if we’re stuck in a frightening new Orwellian paradigm. That’s significant, not only for how we perceive existence, but even in terms of how we experience and respond to it. In fact, these circumstances might even be looked upon as a metaphysical or existential nightmare. So it is for Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), who works for a Vienna-based organization known as MyCompanion, a business that enables clients to hire individuals to serve as professional impersonators or stand-ins for those in need – any need – as conditions warrant. He has become so proficient at this that his services are in high demand. However, Matthias has become so adept at his work that he’s begun to lose himself in it, unsure of where his job leaves off and his own reality begins, and that inherent uncertainty comes with consequences. For instance, it has seriously impacted his relationship with his significant other, Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), who claims that she doesn’t know him anymore. On top of that, Matthias increasingly finds himself embroiled in dubiously complicated cases involving the likes of a bullied wife (Maria Hofstätter) who’s looking for coaching on how to argue more effectively with her overbearing husband (Branko Samarovski) and a wealthy senior (Tilo Nest) who’s looking for someone to stand in as his absent estranged son at his lavish 60th birthday soiree, an event couched in an underlying agenda cooked up by the guest of honor. And, as the protagonist desperately seeks answers to better know his true self and to cope with these ever-maddening circumstances, he feels like he’s becoming hopelessly lost, frequently unable to discern or explain himself. He also unfairly becomes the unwitting object of conjecture, ridicule and blame from outsiders, including uninvolved third parties, who generally misinterpret conditions and see them through their own distorted (and often-shallow) filters, making them unconscious embodiments of unbridled pretention, not unlike superficial, proudly preening peacocks, as one character astutely observes. Writer-director Bernhard Wenger deftly explores these mind-boggling scenarios with delicately applied dry wit and hilarious situational humor, showing more than telling what’s driving his narrative’s objectives. At the same time, though, there’s a deadly seriousness beneath the laughs, making insightful observations about the blurred lines of reality and fantasy, in addition to scathingly symbolic references to social media toxicity and the undue judgmentalism that often tags along for the ride. What’s more, the filmmaker skillfully shows how all of these questionable, seemingly disparate elements ultimately tie together, leaving Matthias (not to mention the rest of us) with a noxious new form of existence that has us wondering about our very nature and what to believe about our fundamental sense of reality. “Peacock” is a smartly written, intelligently crafted debut feature from this gifted filmmaker, one that often reminds me of inventive, quirky pictures like director Ruben Östlund’s “The Square” (2017). It’s a picture that simultaneously entertains, enlightens and inspires in eye-opening ways – provided we leave ourselves open to that possibility. And, in this day and age, we had better do that if we want to avoid consequences that, frankly, could be too troubling to think about.