Touch Me Not: Hybrid doc-fiction tackles sexual connection in a sex-obsessed, intimacy-starved world
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
There's a lot of nudity in Romanian director Adina Pintilie's experimental film, Touch Me Not, though it feels more therapeutic and thoughtful than sexual.
The film, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival last year, is a documentary-fictional hybrid about intimacy and people's discomfort with their bodies. Though it probably takes on more issues than it can handle, Touch Me Not is an intriguing oddity: In a world saturated with sexual imagery but where the subtleties of intimacy are largely mysterious.
There’s a lot of nudity in Touch Me Not, most of it more therapeutic than sensual.
The cast includes professional stage actors, and various documentary subjects including sex workers. Largely shot in pastel, clinical-looking white and grey sets, the film consists of interviews, one-on-one conversations, and the occasional foray into a hospital or a performance space.
The cameras are often visible, and the director herself often appears on a monitor, asking questions to the interview subjects. The interviews are sometimes awkward uncomfortable though never threatening.
Though there is not quite a narrative, two characters (both professional actors) are in shown separate scenes, each seeking help with their issues. Laura Benson plays Laura, a woman around 50, who has a dislike of physical contact. She's desperate to break out of her cage. We first see her with a male escort, but she doesn't interact with him; she sits and watches him shower, then masturbates.
Later, we see her with two different sex therapists. One is Hanna Hofmann, a good-humoured transsexual sex worker who talks about classical music and about how there's no inherently "bad" sex if it's not dangerous, and how it's important to treat sex as a form of play.
The second therapist is Seani Love who, with his beard and spectacles, resembles a professor. He focuses on Laura's hypersensitivity to touch -- using everything from cuddling to soft punching -- in order to tap into her inner anger. "You can't say yes if you can't say no," he explains to her, until she learns to shout and strike back to express her anger. (Periodically, she has visits with her dying father, who, we guess, is somehow connected to her dysfunction.)
A second story line focuses on a what appears to be a form of directed group activity, in which a psychologist leads patients and caregivers in activities where they are asked to "see" each other by touching each other's faces.
One of them, Tómas Lemarquis, who we are told lost all his hair at 13 from alopecia, touches the disfigured jaw of Christian Bayerlein, a man with distorted mouth and spinal muscular atrophy that left him with a child-size body and limited motion. Gradually, the encounters focus on how Tómas, who is emotionally locked in, learns from Christian. Christian says he felt like "a brain being carried around without a body" until he discovered the pleasures of sexuality with his girlfriend, Grit, There's a sequence when he enumerates his physical attractions -- hair, eyes, penis -- that's quite tender. Like Hannah Hoffman, the experience of being in a non-conforming body seems to have led him to wisdom.
Though Tómas and Laura eventually share a sequence, not everything in the film connects. There's a sequence where Tómas enters a sex club, filled with writhing bodies under strobe lighting, which feels pointless. Similarly, a bondage performance between a woman and a man feels rehearsed and mechanical, the sort of self-conscious kink that might crop in an Adrian Lyne film from the ‘80s.
Overall, Touch Me Not is about a fairly diffuse cluster of ideas about the body, some of which resonate more than others. In the best sense, it's a personal film: Pintilie talks on camera about her relationship with her mother, the negative effects of what she calls the "love myth" that encourages suppressing the sensations of the body, including fear and anger, in favour of magical romantic thinking. If Touch Me Not can be considered a love story, it's about the quest for self-love.
Touch Me Not. Written and directed by Adina Pintilie. Starring Laura Benson and Tómas Lemaquis. Touch Me Not shows at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.