Posted: 07/31/2000

The Five Senses

(2000)

by Robin Effron

I am always wary of a gimmicky premise to a film. Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised. In the case of The Five Senses, however, I was rightfully suspicious. Jeremy Podeswa’s new film follows the loosely interlocking stories of 5 individuals who are both guided and led astray by their keen attachment to a certain sense. Ruth (Gabriella Rose) is a masseuse with the gift of touch in healing her clients. Ironically she has symbolically lost touch with her daughter Rachel.

Rachel (Nadia Litz) is a troubled teen who meticulously manipulates her appearance and loses sight of the small girl she is babysitting when she pursues an afternoon of voyeurism in the park. Richard Jacob, (Philippe Volter) a French eye-doctor with a passion for sacred Renaissance choral music, assembles a mental library of sounds upon learning that he is going deaf.

Rona (Mary-Louise Parker) is dissatisfied by the decidedly untasty cakes that she bakes. Her bisexual ex-boyfriend Robert (Daniel McIvor) claims that he can smell love. He has a series of lunches with ex-lovers to try to ascertain what love is (or isn’t) by smelling them.

The film is a mood piece. The fact that no single plot or story drives the movie leaves a great deal of potential for the director to consider a variety of interesting characters through the venue of sensory exploration. Unfortunately, we don’t ever get a full picture of a character, we only view them at their most dark and depressing moments. Smiles are rare and usually angst ridden. Worse, there are enough sullen and foreboding looks in this movie for at least another 100 episodes of The X-Files. Furthermore, the dialogue is so burdensome that every line tries to be one of those Important Statements about Life. Some of the dialogue is actually quite profound, but the heavy-handedness of the writing and direction in the rest of the picture obscures these potentially perceptive moments.

Podeswa both wrote and directed The Five Senses, and I believe that it is largely in the direction of the film that the failure lies. This became most apparent to me as the sub-plot of Richard’s deafness unfolded. I possess a profound love for music and I retain a particular emotional attachment to choral music. Watching Richard listen intensely to these works for the last time, I deeply understand his loss. I am convinced that placing my hand on a wooden pew to feel the vibrations of choral music in a cathedral is a poor substitute for a real performance of Palestrina’s O Magnum Mysterium (a fabulous choice of text for that moment in the film).

I realized, though, that in this movie, I had to make these emotional connections myself. The director has not led me into the lives of these people in the way that he could and should have. I should not have only felt deeply for Richard, I should have been convinced by a mother’s fright at the loss of her child, by a baker’s longing for a full taste in life. I should have been drawn tightly into the world of a teenager who loses sight of something precious in her search for a clear vision, and I should have clearly understood the admittedly bizarre longing to smell love.

I was not, and instead I walked out of the theatre thoroughly depressed and artistically unfulfilled.

Robin Effron is a writer living in Manhattan, where she occassionally shows up at Columbia University as a student of philosophy and political science.

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