Peacock (Austrian-German)

Albrecht Schuch, who played a supporting role in the 2022 German version of All Quiet on the Western Front, takes on quite a different character in Bernhard Wenger’s debut feature, Peacock. Matthias is a man whose gift is his austere agreeableness. He makes a fine living by working for a rent-a-friend firm owned by an acquaintance. The agency sends him to serve as a companion for lonely people who can afford to pay for an artificial relationship. The job draws on Matthias’s passive disposition; his wife, frustrated by his lack of emotion, finally decides to leave him.
In terms of plot, Matthias suggests to an elderly client that she could stand up to her domineering husband if she learned to argue more fervently. In contrast to his usual laid back personality, he acts with the passion of a do-gooder. The results turn out to be disastrous. The film’s dry, dark humor skewers self-improvement programs, social manners, and what sociologist Erving Goffman called the theatrical “Presentation of Self.” Wenger’s ethically challenged characters, enduring sleek, antiseptic lives, are reminiscent of the people who populate the films of Swedish director Ruben Östlund, who takes on bourgeois respectability in films such as Force Majeure and The Square.

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