Privilege

Few major filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s are as underappreciated as Peter Watkins, though given the current availability of his body of work, that's not so difficult to understand. Only one of his films, The War Game, is widely available on video in the United States, and Privilege, which by all rights should be Watkins' most accessible film as his only project financed and distributed by a major American studio, has never received an authorized release on home video, and has gone largely unseen since it dropped out of television distribution in the 1970s. Like the majority of Watkins' films, Privilege is fashioned in the form of a mock-documentary, in this case concerning the life and career of Steven Shorter, a pop star whose career has been carefully stage-managed by the British government to give youthful rebellion a harmless outlet and encourage teenagers to put their pocket money into the U.K. economy. Visually, it's is quite impressive; as a false documentary, it looks every bit as convincing as The War Game and Culloden, and on a grander (and more expensive) scale than either. And while the sociopolitical slant of the film is a bit more obvious than one might expect from Watkins, the material is handled with steely intelligence and no small amount of bleak humor. However, while Watkins was able to draw strikingly naturalistic performances from his actors in most of his films, several members of the cast let him down, particularly Paul Jones as Shorter (as a former singer for Manfred Mann's group, it seem odd that Jones has a hard time fitting in his role as a pop singer) and Jean Shrimpton as an artist commissioned to paint his portrait who also becomes his lover (Shrimpton was a famous model of the day, and while her thespian skills are a notch or two up from the average cover-girl-turned-actress, she has little to do and seems unsure about how to fill up the spaces). But unlike the vast majority of films which attempt to put a serious spin on the significance of youth-culture stardom, Privilege suggests that the real issues are less about selling records and T-shirts to screaming teenagers, but rather the marketing of ideas and political stances to an audience still forming their opinions, and if the specifics are a bit out of date, the guiding ideas behind it are more pertinent than ever. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide