Like a Golden Retriever anticipating his next treat, the handsome, genial Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) spends the dark comedy “Peacock” pandering to whoever’s in front of him. Agreeability is in his nature, but it also happens to be his job description: Matthias runs a companion-for-hire agency in Vienna, Austria, where clients enlist him to playact in social scenarios. One day, he’s pretending to be the boyfriend of an apartment applicant; the next, a pilot visiting his son’s class on career day.
Matthias excels in the job, and relishes the versatile knowledge the sundry roles accord him. The trouble, at least in the eyes of his girlfriend, Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), is that the inexorable performance has erased Matthias’s real personality, leaving an emotional blank. She soon leaves him, triggering in Matthias an identity crisis and newfound doubt in the utility of his services.
The debut feature from the writer-director Bernhard Wenger, “Peacock” aims to satirize a capitalist culture built on artifice. It finds comedy in pulling back the curtain from the civility of Matthias’s curated world to reveal the hypocrisy, deceit and self-interest embedded within. One could read the movie as a study of the state of authenticity in the age of personal branding, or of the stereotype of sterility in the German-speaking world. Watching Matthias on the job is entertaining enough, even as the movie’s allegorical ambitions are stymied by a narrative inertia, and by a sneaking suspicion that we’ve seen this sort of social commentary before.
Peacock
Not rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
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