William Klein The Model Couple (Le Couple Témoin) 1977
In this prescient sci-fi farce, the fictional Ministry of Future offers an average French couple the opportunity to function as test subjects in the development of an ideal City of the Future. Confined to a modular prototype apartment, they live under constant televised surveillance and public scrutiny as a team of scientists subjects them to a range of psychometric and behavioural tests, often vexing and absurd. The experience proves revealing both for the couple and for the scientists (themselves mere workers exploited by the Ministry), until a group of pubescent 'terrorists' occupies the model apartment to free the couple from their standardised, aseptic prison through the unleashing of sheer juvenile chaos. A critique of the distortions of modernist utopias into postwar architecture and design, which looks shockingly prophetic from the present perspective of a society bombarded with reality TV shows and ruled by the logic of market research.
Watch a clip from The Model Couple