It was John-Paul Sartre�s In Camera which made the observation that �Hell is other people�. Here, three disparate, flawed and objectionable characters are united in the afterlife in hell, consisting of a small inescapable room containing useless objects, where it is no longer possible to close your eyes and turn your back on reality, instead one has to endure the company of the others for eternity. Strange then that Big Brother has become such a televisual phenomenon; a �reality game-show� in which a collection of people have their rights to privacy and movement removed and must endure and compete against those with whom they are forced to exist; the name of the game being greed and selfishness. The television companies it seems are only too willing to cynically exploit the voyeuristic and quite possibly sadistic tendencies of nations of viewers.
Writer-Director Daniel Minahan takes such a formula of making a soap-opera out of the lives of real people to its ultimate stage, namely a game-show called The Contenders, the highest-rating reality game-show in America, where the aim of the game is to dispose of all the other contestants until they are the only one left standing, the prize merely being to stay alive. The film is shot to make it feel like you are watching a whole series of episodes, in doing so, employing flashy visuals, a stereotypically dramatic voice-over, and shaky camera footage as the film crew pursue the protagonists as they chase each other. The contestants are chosen at random through a lottery draw and are unwillingly conscripted into a life-and-death game; kill or be killed. Frighteningly, the most random and unlikely of contenders are transformed into brutal killing machines; an ageing, religious nurse, an artist ravaged by testicular cancer, a drug-addled, unemployed father. The current series� reigning champion is an eight-months pregnant woman, determined to stay alive to protect her unborn child, and yet one of the new contenders turns out to be a childhood sweetheart with whom she is still very much in love.
Wry, playful, brilliantly sickening, and brutally satirical, Series 7 is a blackly comic affair, filled with excellently dry one-liners and surreal situations. The performances, from relatively unknown actors, are terrific. Yet at times the concept is both gruesome and terrifying, as when one contender savagely bludgeons another to death in the middle of a crowded shopping mall in front of her on-looking parents. Filmed at a breathlessly fast pace, feral killings are explicitly depicted and no punches are pulled throughout; slashed throats, point-black shootings and lethal injections all thrown into the mix. Minahan clearly enjoys his sardonic viewpoint, making the show both trashy and over-dramatised, closely mirroring the slick production values of American television stations, in its most tongue-in-cheek moment producing the final death scene as a ridiculous re-enactment, surely a commentary on how heavily censored such shows actually are. However, far from being buried under its own post-modernism, The Contenders, in its apocalyptic vision of television and American society, manages to make pertinent points about competitiveness, moral and social values of love and friendship, and the cynical blood-thirsty tactics of television�s culture-makers. An entirely commendable concept, and an applaudable 90 minutes of cinema. |
