ZPG: Zero Population Growth (review)

Hollywood produced a fair number of post-catastrophe films in the early to mid 1970s. Many of them, like Silent Running (Trumbull US 1972), Soylent Green (Fleischer US 1973) and Logan's Run (Anderson US 1976), hold a reputation somewhere between cult and canonical. Mocked for their kitsch visions of the future, they are also recognised as enduring contributions to dystopian sf. In contrast, ZPG: Zero Population Growth (1971) has fallen into obscurity, despite obvious thematic connections with a contemporaneous cycle of ecologically themed thrillers.

It is easy to speculate why Michael Campus' film has failed to generate affection. The performances and narrative border on the glacial and occasionally stretch credulity, the central premise is not particularly memorable or distinctive and the sets and special effects are drab and cheap-looking. ZPG imagines a totalitarian future cityscape swamped in dense smog, scurried through by forlorn residents wearing protective masks. Exterior sequences are thus filmed through a conveniently foggy gauze that barely compensates for some thinly populated crowd sequences and shoddily painted backgrounds. It is all too evident that the actors, never mind the characters, have never left their soundstage city, which appears to have been somewhere in Denmark. Such murkiness is not helped by the lacklustre presentation of the film on DVD, issued as a Region 1 disc by Legend. The print is faded and washed-out, the sound lacks clarity at times and the absence of any extras on the disc reinforces the impression of a movie unclaimed, unloved and abandoned, even by genre fans. There is a similar fogginess to the back-story and geographical setting, and the filmmakers' stance on the environmental issue is indeterminate to say the least. Yet the overall effect is to sustain an ambience of stasis and interiority that is oddly beguiling in its own way, and quite appropriate for a story about resistance to repressive authority.

ZPG begins with an announcement from the 'President of the Society', a tweedy-looking man with curious spectacles, reporting on the unanimous decision reached by a world council in response to the increasing threat posed to the planet by overpopulation. Child-bearing is now forbidden, so broody couples must make do with surrogate (and rather creepy) baby dolls. Transgressors are to be rooted out and placed in public extermination domes, a potential fate that awaits Carol and Russ McNeil (Geraldine Chaplin and Oliver Reed), when they choose to follow their biological impulses and conceive a child in secret.

The McNeils enjoy a privileged standard of life as performers and inhabitants of a wing of the 'State Museum' devoted to the lifestyles of the 1970s. Other residents face a wait of up to four years to gain entry into an exhibition showing the artefacts and primitive habits of a civilisation deemed responsible for the current crisis. The film never shows us the typical living space of the pliant drones meekly queuing to gain entry, but we infer that the McNeils are at a considerable advantage in their spacious and artfully furnished home, enjoying real food and drink rather than the ersatz kind suffered by everyone else, and even able to source a genuine Christmas tree. Together with their friends George and Edna Borden (Don Gordon and Diane Cilento), the McNeils act out little vignettes of decadent bourgeois ritual - such as a dinner party with some sort of swinging element - for the edification of museum visitors.

The enclosure of the characters for much of film within a simulation of a 1970s environment is a nifty cost-cutting device, but also lends the story the insularity of a chamber drama. The screenwriters, Frank De Felitta and Max Ehrlich, both experienced TV writers, seem more interested in the psychological fallout of totalitarian repression than in the wider societal or philosophical implications of birth control. Hence, ZPG is closer in purpose and tone to the East German surveillance thriller Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others; von Donnersmarck Germany 2006) than to immediate reference points such as...