Behind the masks

AUSTRIAN filmmaker Bernhard Wenger’s debut feature, Peacock, shares its quirky gene pool with Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund’s works in that it’s a sharp observation and incisive critique of contemporary civilisation and culture, and a thoughtful exploration of the human predicaments and individual anxieties stemming from it.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

The object of Wenger’s curiosity, however, goes beyond just the world of the privileged and the rich and the famous. In fact, its premise took me back more specifically to Amrita Bagchi’s much-appreciated “family members for hire” Indian short film, Succulent. Peacock is inspired by the rent-a-friend agencies in Japan, but rooted in a larger existential crisis, the inability to form human connect, the resultant lack of communication, sense of exile and loneliness among individuals and having to take recourse to pretence to plug that vital gap in lives. Giving them a helping hand is a Vienna-based company called My Companion, from where they can rent any relation—father, son, boyfriend, husband—for a stipulated period of time. The employee, who is most proficient in wearing these multiple masks, Matthias (Albert Schuch), believes that “good service is its own reward”. But while donning a new face every day, he can no longer remain in touch with himself. He stops being himself as the fiction