There are only so many ways one can put up a facade, and yet every time Matthias (an unassumingly effective Albrecht Schuch) takes on a different life in different social scenarios, in front of total strangers, it’s as if all the pretense is infinite. Matthias has faked it so real he’s actually made it real, which begins to feel like there’s no turning back. “We act in the real world,” he says at one point. “We really need to inhabit our roles.” And so it goes in the life of the protagonist in Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wenger’s absurdist black comedy Peacock, which had its world premiere in the International Film Critics’ Week at last year’s Venice Film Festival. The title has been selected as the Austrian entry for the best international feature film category at the 98th Academy Awards.
Taking its cue from the sudden boom in companion-for-hire agencies in Japan, the film’s hooky premise sees Schuch, the German star who earned a BAFTA nomination for his performance in 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, as a readily compelling antihero, who runs his own friend-rental company in Vienna, Austria, and whose idea of a real connection is pretending like you have one. The job is certainly lucrative, which allows him to live in a big, modernist house with his girlfriend Sophia (Julia Franz Richter). Often dressed nicely and groomed neatly like a real estate broker ready for sales talk, Matthias breezes through his roles, from the perfect son to the present father, from the cultured concert companion to the controlling husband. But in private, when he and Sophia spend dinner with friends, he almost freezes up and doesn’t have much to contribute during their conversations, which prompts her to dump him, mournfully arguing that he “doesn’t seem real anymore.” So begins this perfect companion’s identity crisis: Who is he beyond the roles he plays for his clients?
Left on his own, Matthias starts to rediscover his existential north star, which finds him renting a Pomeranian puppy, trying out meditation, running into a potential lover he once met in a concert (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø), or dealing with the aggrieved husband (Branko Samarovski) of one of his clients. But it would take more than these encounters for him to overcome such an existential blank, if at all. Wenger plots this search for selfhood rather languidly, distantly, steep in images that are smooth and still, courtesy of cinematographer Albin Wildner, who makes great use of interior shots to portray the emotional hollowness at the center of the movie. The director also finds bleak humor in moments when Matthias grows more unsteady and strips himself of all the artifice. And much of this would not work at all if it weren’t hinged on such an assured central performance by Schuch, who seems totally game to shift from one persona to another like a chameleon, and to embody the roles within the role with real texture. It is when Matthias loses control of what is real and what is put-on, second guessing the sincerity of the people he interacts with, that Schuch commands the portrayal wholeheartedly.
In an age when real personality is reduced to mere personal branding and every aspect of our lives has to be fashionably curated before a virtual audience, Peacock, even as it literalizes its central imagery for the viewer, argues for the spontaneous and the anti-people pleaser, though that is perhaps a pretty obvious reading. At its core, the film comments on how capitalist and neoliberal structures have successfully commodified the ideals of self-reinvention and professional upward mobility.
Peacock is Austria’s selection for Best International Feature Film for the upcoming Academy Awards.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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