Anton Dolin. Cinema-4: false feeling

Towards the release of the Canadian drama "The Five Senses" and the Korean erotic film "The Lie"

In theory, the Canadian "Five Senses" by Jeremy Podeswa and the South Korean "The Lie" by Sung-Woo Young should have opened at the domestic box office at the same time. A beautiful picture was emerging - but it didn’t work out, for reasons more of a technical than ideological nature - “Lies” will appear ten days later. However, many people watched it at the Moscow Film Festival, and the puzzle will still come together. The paintings are united by one theme. A certain well-wisher of “Lies” even suggested in a letter to the IMDB site that its title should be changed to “From the Realm of the Senses.”

This theme is formulated quite clearly - the loss of sensitivity by modern man. In other words, the search for the causes of the crisis of both modern art and traditional humanistic ideals in the disappearance (or displacement) of feelings. Americans, of course, are looking for and finding their sixth, while in Canada and Korea they are trying to recapture those same familiar five. Vision, smell, touch, taste, hearing. The heroes of “The Five Senses,” each of whom is more or less clearly associated with one of the senses, are trying to get through them to their neighbor; the two central and only (the rest are reduced to pure functions) characters in “Lies” have found each other, but their feelings are different. -still blocked. How to free them?

It is banal and obvious that the word itself and, especially, the concept of “feeling” are primarily associated with love. It is natural that all the characters in both films appear immersed in one kind of love or another. The doctor Richard (Philippe Voltaire - a sophisticated Frenchman against the backdrop of a modest Canadian life, a former hero of "Blue" and "The Double Life of Veronica" by Kislevsky) loses his hearing and only through contact with a former acquaintance finds the ability to "hear differently." One minute he catches the beat of her heart, placing his head on her chest, and now he doesn’t. How can you find something when life forces you to lose it? The leitmotif of loss can be read clearly - through the connection between all the characters in "The Five Senses" - the little girl Amy Lee, who ran away from a babysitter in the park and spent two days at an abandoned construction site. While “the firefighters are looking for her, the police are looking for her,” the rest are trying to somehow sort out their losses. Masseuse Ruth, who makes money from other people's feelings (touch) , is unable to touch - either literally or figuratively - anyone close to her. Her daughter Rachel, who is trying to see herself from the outside (vision) , is nearsighted. It is she who loses the three-year-old girl “out of sight”; She can only see someone else's, and an incorrect reflection - her friend, high school student Rupert, turned into a transvestite. Voyeurism becomes a kind of blinding. Rhona (taste) is a designer of cakes that, while extremely picturesque to look at, turn out to be tasteless. Her new lover is the Italian home-grown cook Roberto, who comes to live and cook in her house, not knowing a word of English. Another sense - the feeling of the tongue - merges with the sense of taste, and in both cases Rona is powerless. Where there is no common language (taste), love does not work. Finally, Robert (the main acting success of the film - the delicate and ironic co-writer of the film, Daniel McIvor, is a cross between Sergei Makovetsky and Kevin Spacey) works as a professional cleaner, and he has lost his main smell - the smell of love. Quite shamelessly, as is expected in modern art, director Podesva stole the beautiful image of Patrick Suskind . Robert searches for the scent of love by meeting former lovers and mistresses, but to no avail. Until he meets a young couple - perfume developers, who manage to create a magical scent and give it to Robert.

A slight sense of optimism in Podesva’s rather traditional (autumn-nostalgic, humane-ironic) painting is modeled without difficulty. Each viewer places emphasis in his own way, but to me the idea of “spirits of love” seems like a utopia, and the impasse of “not feeling” a reality. Or: the problem is real, its resolution at the film level is not quite. Well, the schematism is normal, but the goodness (the lost girl was found - all this time she ate the “leftover food of the builders”, and in general - everyone seems to be happy) does not console. When you think about what the next morning of the heroes will be like after this sweet, quiet evening, all the joy from the happy ending disappears. In this sense, the much less realism-oriented film "The Lie" is much more honest.

Based on a scandalous novel, the film was supposed to become even more scandalous. And it did - for example, in quite liberal South Korea (still not North Korea, and not China either) it never made it into theaters. Sun-Woo Young told the love story of an eighteen-year-old (underage by Korean standards) high school student Y and a forty-year-old sculptor J. Moving away from the traditional methods of film language exploited by Podesva left and right, the Korean avant-garde artist combines specific Asian psychologism (facial expressions and gestures inaccessible to Europeans, and thus more bewitching; running line of hieroglyphic titles explaining what is happening on the screen - see Oshima's "Taboo" ) and European fashionable technology ("dogmatic" live camera and ragged editing, creating a pseudo-effect of the reality of what is depicted). It turns out interesting. For example, unlike Podesva, who carefully writes out his five stories and combines them into a fairly elegant coherent screenplay, the Korean director reduces the narrative component to a minimum. That is, despite the credits, there is no story as such. Here they met (forty seconds of screen time) - and here is their first sexual intercourse (fifteen minutes). And so on. One hotel after another, meager words and unequivocal actions. Along the way, inadvertently, it turns out that J has an unloved wife in Paris, that Y’s jealous older brother burned down J’s house, that they are destined to part, having finally met at Charles de Gaulles airport. But none of this matters. This has practically nothing to do with the main occupation of the main characters.

Actually, this activity is not even sex, at least not sex in the familiar sense to you and me, which is what distributors usually mean when they bashfully assign the label “soft porn” to this or that provocative and good film. J is obsessed with sadomasochism, and Y loves her first man so much that she is ready to do anything. And then she gets the taste. The entire film, stripped naked, they beat each other on the asses with sticks and rods. The most amazing thing is that, although there is no intrigue in this (except that the bars become more and more iron, and the clubs become more and more weighty until they turn - at the final date - into a giant baseball bat), "The Lie" holds the viewer to end. And it’s not about the “strawberry” - it is quite monotonous and not piquant enough, plus the actors are unprofessional and too spontaneous to create an exciting effect (they say that the actor actually fell in love with the actress during filming - that’s a “lie”). The secret is that through psychedelic immersion in the monotony of an unusual sexual gesture, the director explores the same problem of loss of sensitivity that is close to most of us. What is love, what is its relationship to sex, how is violence connected to all this, and should such a story have - not even a happy ending, but a primitive dramatic development?

Yes, it shouldn't. Sun-Woo Young abolishes the newly created “sense of language”, to which, by the way, the language of cinema partly belongs. In its presentation, his film “sounds” (reads) paradoxically and even flawed; the characters’ lines and the text of the stage directions lose all meaning. What remains (besides the author allowing himself - but not the characters! - one more sense, a sense of humor) are fundamentally inexpressible and inexpressible taste, smell, sight, smell, touch in particular - almost felt when viewing, forcing the man and woman on the screen to do something absurd and at the same time so logical. This is where the mysterious title of the film is revealed. The lie remains outside the picture itself. Lies are unspoken words that could justify, condemn or explain what is happening. Lies are those feelings that, in addition to the five main ones, he and she usually experience for each other. To avoid lies, the author of the film is silent about love. He does not allow the strange harmony to last long - J and Y are forced to part without saying anything to each other, simply beating each other with a bat with tears in their eyes. “And then I started lying,” are the last words spoken by the hero before the start of the final credits. Behind the world of feelings begins the world of words, consisting of lies.

And did they ever exist, feelings? Reflexes - yes, but feelings - maybe this is just a wrong word into which we put the wrong meaning? If this is so, everything falls into place - both the hopeless search for unrealistic feelings and the rejection of them as useless words. I’ll stop talking about this.

The premiere of “Five Senses” will take place at the 35 mm cinema on September 14, and the premiere of “Lies” will take place at MDM Cinema on September 24.

The next article will be dedicated to Lars von Trier’s mini-festival “Trierism” and will be devoted to the stages of the director’s creative path.