Perfect Sense (2012)

This is not a love story, this is not a contagion story, this is an insanely, painfully beautiful, accurate and honest depiction of what it means to be human. Of what keeps humanity afloat despite all the shit and hatred surrounding us. This movie helps to stay sane in this insane world, to not lose track of truly important things, all the things beyond fat and flour (you'll get that last bit once you watch it).This movie is timeless. You will cry at the end. But you will smile doing it. And if you have someone to hug, make sure they are around. You'll really need a hug after it, you'll really need to feel connected to someone. (if you're human, that is)

This film was an unexpected gem. If Derren Brown made full-feature films then its plausible this is a film he would make, of course that would be the other film with 10 out of 10 though. Its not often I finish watching a film laughing giddily into the abyss, in this case I did. Individual reactions may vary but the high ratings received by the film show that maybe they don't vary too much. More than anything this film is very clever, it plays with expectations and preconceptions and delivers a powerful emotional punch - a la Derren Brown. Devilishly charming, with an elegantly simple (clever) wit!

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"? Aside from imminent sentimentality, this description signalled to me the inevitable deployment of a cheap trick. Yet with Eva Green and Ewan McGregor leading the cast, I thought, give me a taste of the maudlin gimmick.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 an alley with Susan's apartment. Both characters are self-admitted assholes 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 will say that you'll be missing out if, based on any blurb, you dismiss this movie entirely. "Perfect sense" is a gem that increases in value the longer you look at it. "And what are we 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've 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 flavor through music. So in a sense, synesthesia becomes a short-term savior. Though the movie provides much food for thought, at heart it's a love story between Susan and Michael. Remember that. Whether or not their love burgeons as a result of the apocalypse doesn't matter. We don't know what causes the disease. Is it environmental? Manmade? Gaia? Aliens? We never find out, so in that respect there's no didacticism. Neither are we subjected to some cornball yarn about love transcending space and time. The more existential and less literal question we're left with as a result is: Really, though, what else of any significance is there? 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 isn't, sustains us. It's sustenance. In the same vein, "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. Something of what the 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. Potentially, perhaps coincidentally, yet for certain thankfully, love also happens to be all we need in perilous times like these. And if that's gimmicky then so are we.

It's not that often I write feedback on IMDb, a film has to move me an awful lot for me to do that. Perfect Sense moved me from the start. I had this instinct that it was going to be pretentious nonsense masquerading as art house and I was spot on. It's produced about as well as you'd expect of a 1st year media studies student, although that fits the story, which is about as interesting as that written by a grade one primary pupil. Everyone in the world cries, then loses their sense of smell. No-one knows why. Then they lose their sense of taste too. Amidst all of this is the story of 2 people who meet and start a relationship, which is poorly acted and utterly unbelievable. The constant voice-over is meant to add some kind of gravitas to the movie with a despondent death knell of a message which sounds like it was written by a 10 year old. That's enough, this film is utter, total rubbish and I am quite annoyed that I wasted 90 minutes of my life suffering this tripe.