The second day after having won a Golden Bear and the prize for best debut film last year in Berlin, the Romanian public jubilated and appropriated the success of director Adina Pintilie and her team, making it a national one, another proof of Romanian genius for the world to see. The commentators were proud, jubilating for two seconds like their ground school kid had won some talent contest. I must confess, after hearing the news I felt a little national pride myself. That’s why I’ve read everything I could about the film and its director, about which I hadn’t heard before. And, the more I read about it, the more I knew that, after all that praise, the vitriol will soon follow. Sure enough, like death and taxes or a painful indigestion on a summer day, it soon arrived and was just as nasty. To be fair, the film has been strongly criticized by the foreign press, too.
Regarding strictly the online commentators, I would never, for the life of me, understand how the Barbarian hordes of the virtual realm can criticize something without having consumed the product first. I do understand that, even nowadays, it is hard to see such a film from a traditional point of view, with a mindset of learned and unquestioned values. Still, it is hard for me to understand the laughter and embarrassment of some full grown and long past adolescence people when seeing a penis on the big screen, in the era of porn-film saturation.
*
The great thing about this Romanian film, though, is that it’s totally devoid of nationality. Its ambition is to reach the core of our collective humanity. The film is about everyone and each one of us, as we are in the privacy of our thoughts, people that are thrown into a strange world, in a strange body, living a strange life among the others who are just as or even stranger than us. This “strangeness” is being further accentuated by the music of the German avant-garde rock outfit, Einstürzende Neubauten. The contorted voice of Blixa Bargeld is the quintessential lament of what is censored within ourselves (Blixa Bargeld himself was the personification of what living in the conventional society forces us to suffocate within ourselves) and seems to be the interior voice of Laura, the protagonist of the film.
Laura – played here by the British actress Laura Benson – is looking to connect (or re-connect) with her sexuality, but she finds it impossible letting herself be touched. Laura’s journey and the unique experiences and people she encounters on the way help her discover herself, become vulnerable and open up by staying strong.
The meanings of this movie, though, are like wet fishing nets on a rainy night; just when you think you got the hang of one, it slips through your fingers. Still, for me, the purpose of Laura’s journey is one towards self-acceptance, because she finds it hard accepting the inevitable transformations that time imposes on her body and loving her body and life as they are. She seems tormented by some great guilt, and the repeated visits we see her making at the hospital where she finds difficult communicating with the man she’s visiting, gives us some clues as to the source of that guilt. Still, the narrative isn’t being burdened with explanations. The “why” is not important here; we each know some difficult “why”. What this movie-essay is trying to explain is the “how”: how we learn to live with ourselves and how we choose between love and fear.
*
Another pilgrim on his own private journey is Tómas. He fights demons of his own, quite dangerous to himself and those around him, a stalker in the shadows. Tómas takes part in group therapy that encourages open communication and honesty between therapy partners. The communication is based on empathy and is used as the key to opening up towards the other through internalizing and really becoming aware of another person’s perspective. This is a much-needed approach in a time when we are becoming more and more alone, lonely and less capable to accept people getting too close.
The movie is a tender essay, an experimental therapy in itself, a safe visual space for all those involved and this fact transpires in the fact that I, for one, have not for one second felt embarrassed by the nudity displayed or by the intrusion in the intimacy of the characters. This happens, I believe, when the actors trust their director.
Christian Bayerlein’s story, his monologue, and his entire persona made me think about some things that I hadn’t until then, for example, the right to sexuality that each of us must have, but most of the people that live with a physical disability are often being deprived of. Christian is a kind of spiritual guide for Laura and Tómas, his character being the most nuanced and well spoken of the entire movie. His positivity is inspiring and makes him into the hero of the movie.
TmN is not only about sex and sexuality; to a greater degree, it’s about the courage one needs in order to find intimacy with another person, about the barriers that we built around ourselves, made out of trauma and fear.
The total connection with the “Other” is improbable because the tendency we each have in a relationship is to remain autonomous to the highest degree. We speak a lot while we don’t listen enough and are in a constant race to impose our will and point of view on our partners. The paradox here is that we feel the urge to understand our partner completely and to be completely understood by them, to be completely accepted by them and to become “One”. Thus, the union between bodies during the sexual act becomes a culmination of spiritual dissolution of the “I” into the “Other”, a sublimated communication that transcends language.
Without this dissolution of the “Self”, dangerous and necessary at the same time, the “I” becomes stuck alone in its fleshy cage and isolated in the framework of its own prejudice, finding it hard to create profound connections and even harder to keep them. Not necessarily because solitude and auto-sufficiency is a negative thing, not because the only way to feel emotionally fulfilled is in a relationship, but because the lack of profound connections with the “Other”, whoever that may be, is slowly eroding not only the humanity within a person but the social fiber itself.
In this sense, “TmN” appears to be the antithesis of “Shame”, the brilliant movie on sexual addiction, directed by the British Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), which, voluntarily or not, Adina Pintilie evokes often in her film. In “Shame”, Brandon, the main character, is running from himself and from everybody else – pushing even his sister away. His journey turns into a downward spiral. He loses the ability to relate to people, to create meaningful connections beyond physical attraction, thus reaching the point where he almost loses his humanity and tries to self-destroy. His inability to assume intimacy turns into shame, which turns into self-hate. Adina’s characters are searching for one another and for an authentic human connection like you would look for water in the desert. They do this through being patient and open to each other, releasing themselves from fear through self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, and self-love, learning to touch and to let themselves be touched.
*
After seeing the film, I thought that if God was a woman, she would fall in love with Adina’s film. Soon after, I changed my mind and told myself: “If God would be…, he would surely be too busy with much urgent stuff than our small intellectual battles. He would watch, for example, from afar at the species that is joyfully destroying its habitat and would say to himself: Geeeee....zăsssss, wtf???”, then shrug and go on about his day, building new universes.
If I would be God, I would ask Adina to borrow the immaculate heaven she created so that I can spread it over the Earth and place in its middle the Tree of Love.
Trailer of "Touch me Not" (2018)
Einstürzende Neubauten - Befindlichkeit des Landes is hummed throughout the film
Photo is a still from Touch me Not opening scene.
Photo source:
https://strongerdocs.com/touch-me-not
Photo source:
https://strongerdocs.com/touch-me-not
No comments:
Post a Comment