The log-line of "Perfect Sense" (directed by David Mackenzie) makes the movie sound gimmicky at best. "A chef and a scientist fall in love as an epidemic begins to rob people of their sensory perceptions?" Not only did I see this description as a harbinger of gooey sentimentality, it also suggested that a cheap trick would be deployed to trap me in it. Yet with Eva Green and Ewan McGregor leading the cast, I figured I could get stuck in a lot worse goop.
Turns out very little of this movie is logged in that inadequate line, and rarely have I been so glad to be wrong.
Susan (Green) is an epidemiologist working on this sense-subtracting disease that begins with a few cases and ends up a pandemic. Michael (McGregor) is a talented chef at a high-end restaurant that shares with Susan's apartment an alleyway in which they meet. Both characters are self-admitted a-holes who fall in unlikely love while this affliction deconstructs their very personhood (along with everyone else's on the planet). I don't need to tell you to balk at my description if I've made the movie sound less watchable than the log-line has. Yet I'll instist as well that you'll be missing out if, based on anyone's words, you dismiss this movie entirely.
"Perfect sense" is a gem that increases in value the longer you look at it. "And what are human beings really?" it seems to ask. "A number of perceptual senses linked to a narrow spectrum of underlying emotions?" That's one suggestion it communicates before adding: "You gotta love that." Prior to losing each sense, victims of this disease experience an uncontrollable surge of emotion: despair before losing smell, ravenousness before taste, rage before hearing and, ushering in the loss of sight, all-encompassing love and hope. Darkness at last consumes all victims while blindly and silently they cling to loved ones whom they can also neither smell nor taste. Left with only the ability to feel the person beside them, all await the final subtraction (touch) that can only render them lifeless.
Two of the many interesting things about this apocalyptic movie are the disease that sense-by-sense disassembles people, and the adaptive measures people take in order to cope with their ensuing condition. Those who can no longer taste begin to describe food in terms of texture, consistency or with onomatopoeia while artists attempt to reintroduce or at least remember flavour through music and poetry. Synesthesia becomes a short-term savior you might say
Though the movie provides many snacks for thought, at heart it's a love story between Susan and Michael. Remember that, because it's refreshingly easy to forget. Does their love burgeon as a result of the apocalypse? Or is it simply the proximity of his restaurant and her apartment that brings them together? Who's to say? Neither do we know what causes the disease. Is it environmental? Manmade? Aliens? We never find out. So not only are we protected from heavyhanded didacticism, we're also shielded from any cornball yarn about love transcending space and time. The more existential and less literal question we're left with as a result is: Seriously, folks, what else of any significance is there to life besides love?
I'm reminded of "Poem" by Al Purdy, particularly its last line: "...there is nothing at all I can do except hold your hand and not go away." The sense of helplessness Purdy conveys when the narrator tries to console an ill loved one, a time when nothing can be done for someone other than to provide a loving presence, is nothing if not touching to the reader because of its understated, pragmatic truth: love, whatever magic it's not, sustains us. Similarly, "Perfect Sense" isn't saying that love intensifies as the disease progresses. It isn't claiming that with all distractions removed love can be seen for what it is, all-important. Thanks for sparing us those sentiments by the way. Some of what this movie does say is that love, nurturing, care, warmth, whatever you want to call it, as we slowly fall apart, is the one thing we can still manage to express with each, however limited, piece of ourselves we have left--and right up until removal of our last sense snuffs us out.
Love also happens to be sorely needed in perilous times like these. And if that's gimmicky then so are we.
Turns out very little of this movie is logged in that inadequate line, and rarely have I been so glad to be wrong.
Susan (Green) is an epidemiologist working on this sense-subtracting disease that begins with a few cases and ends up a pandemic. Michael (McGregor) is a talented chef at a high-end restaurant that shares with Susan's apartment an alleyway in which they meet. Both characters are self-admitted a-holes who fall in unlikely love while this affliction deconstructs their very personhood (along with everyone else's on the planet). I don't need to tell you to balk at my description if I've made the movie sound less watchable than the log-line has. Yet I'll instist as well that you'll be missing out if, based on anyone's words, you dismiss this movie entirely.
"Perfect sense" is a gem that increases in value the longer you look at it. "And what are human beings really?" it seems to ask. "A number of perceptual senses linked to a narrow spectrum of underlying emotions?" That's one suggestion it communicates before adding: "You gotta love that." Prior to losing each sense, victims of this disease experience an uncontrollable surge of emotion: despair before losing smell, ravenousness before taste, rage before hearing and, ushering in the loss of sight, all-encompassing love and hope. Darkness at last consumes all victims while blindly and silently they cling to loved ones whom they can also neither smell nor taste. Left with only the ability to feel the person beside them, all await the final subtraction (touch) that can only render them lifeless.
Two of the many interesting things about this apocalyptic movie are the disease that sense-by-sense disassembles people, and the adaptive measures people take in order to cope with their ensuing condition. Those who can no longer taste begin to describe food in terms of texture, consistency or with onomatopoeia while artists attempt to reintroduce or at least remember flavour through music and poetry. Synesthesia becomes a short-term savior you might say
Though the movie provides many snacks for thought, at heart it's a love story between Susan and Michael. Remember that, because it's refreshingly easy to forget. Does their love burgeon as a result of the apocalypse? Or is it simply the proximity of his restaurant and her apartment that brings them together? Who's to say? Neither do we know what causes the disease. Is it environmental? Manmade? Aliens? We never find out. So not only are we protected from heavyhanded didacticism, we're also shielded from any cornball yarn about love transcending space and time. The more existential and less literal question we're left with as a result is: Seriously, folks, what else of any significance is there to life besides love?
I'm reminded of "Poem" by Al Purdy, particularly its last line: "...there is nothing at all I can do except hold your hand and not go away." The sense of helplessness Purdy conveys when the narrator tries to console an ill loved one, a time when nothing can be done for someone other than to provide a loving presence, is nothing if not touching to the reader because of its understated, pragmatic truth: love, whatever magic it's not, sustains us. Similarly, "Perfect Sense" isn't saying that love intensifies as the disease progresses. It isn't claiming that with all distractions removed love can be seen for what it is, all-important. Thanks for sparing us those sentiments by the way. Some of what this movie does say is that love, nurturing, care, warmth, whatever you want to call it, as we slowly fall apart, is the one thing we can still manage to express with each, however limited, piece of ourselves we have left--and right up until removal of our last sense snuffs us out.
Love also happens to be sorely needed in perilous times like these. And if that's gimmicky then so are we.