Original title: Touch me not · Adina Pintilie · Romania · 2018 · Script: Adina Pintilie· Interpreters: Laura Benson, Thomas Lemarquis, Hermann Mueller, Christian Bayerlein.
When Romanian director Adina Pintilie's first feature film premiered at last year's Berlin Festival, The criticism of the general press in our country did not receive it favorably.. In general, They found the film an empty and pretentious exercise. And although it is true that this experiment can, from a certain perspective, commit some excess, It is no less true that it contains many paths, we could say intuitions, that it is not advisable to cheerfully disdain without falling into that same banality that, with so much vehemence, They criticized its author. The long period of time that has passed since that distant premiere at the German festival until its landing in commercial theaters, could be proof of the ambiguity that a piece like this raises for the film industry itself.
To talk about an argument here would be to make a serious mistake.. So much so, that the film's own promotional notes avoid making direct reference to it. There are only notes of what happens, but we will not see the development of anything resembling a plot. In Touch me not we found a mature woman, Laura, who has trouble having physical contact with other people (hence the title of the film, something like “Do not touch me”). While exploring with sporadic encounters the cause of this apparent pathology, Laura visits a kind of therapy center where people with different physical anomalies meet in order to overcome their aversions and get their lives back on track.. There we will meet Tomas, a young man with strong emotional conflicts, y Christian, another man affected by atrophy that has paralyzed almost his entire body. Between what you see in the center and what you experience in those chance encounters with strangers in your own home, Laura will try to overcome the hostility she feels when in contact with others.. Hostility that, we will discover, It is nothing but hostility against itself, against his own body. While, the director of this film herself takes note of everything with her camera.
Adina Pintilie approaches this work as a kind of personal exploration in which she exposes, First, your own doubts and apprehensions. This is how this work starts. In a voice in off that serves as an introduction and invitation to his work, Pintilie herself takes us back to her youth, when I was twenty years old and thought I knew everything about love and intimate relationships. Time passed, at almost forty, Experience has taught him that those impressions were wrong.. Life was richer and more complex than she had speculated and she wants to know more.. So, one of the first images that appears on the screen is, precisely, yours. A cameraman places a glass in front of the lens as a telepronter. Reflected in the glass is the bust of the director who interviews the one who will be her actress and, at the same time, its main character. This putting himself in the foreground was one of the points on which those first criticisms of this film were focused.. But although we could value this image as a sample of unnecessary narcissism, From another point of view it could also be understood as a demonstration of modesty on the part of the author who, in this way, is the first victim of this harsh test to which the public is going to be subjected.
Touch me not It is a film that attacks, First, to our senses. Senses that are the prelude to the prejudices that we have in our heads and that constitute the essence of our taboos. The eye is caught from the first bars of the narrative. In one of the first sequences, Tomas and Christian participate in an exercise in which the former must explore the face of his therapy partner with his hands.. The sight of Christian's deformed face and body catches us off guard and, for a moment, we feel the same rejection as Tomas who, although you do the exercise, feel the temptation to withdraw, as he himself will explain. Thus, no hot cloths, Adina Pintilie puts the viewer before her own acceptance of the grotesque y, with that, confronts your perception of normal. Locked in the dark cinema room, the viewer cannot help but look at what is in front of him, an image that bothers you (and it is curious to certify here the physical reactions that these images provoke in the audience), but from which you cannot abstract yourself except by closing your eyes or leaving your seat.. Like Tomas, the viewer is forced, So, to touch every detail of Christian's face, who looks at him with those eyes that are, definitely, mirror in which we are reflected.
From here, The film goes through a succession of many other bodies that escape the standard of beauty or the normal that prevails in our societies.. From the thick bodies of Tomas and Christian's therapy partners, to Hanna's flabby breasts, a transvestite man who is around fifty and who offers his companion services over the internet. Touch me not It's a film about the skin. Skins that are sought and rejected, who try to find themselves to recognize themselves, finally, to themselves. Touch becomes, this way, in the second sense to which this work appeals. This is undoubtedly another of his achievements. Which for cinema in general could be a limitation, that is to say, the fact that images cannot, by themselves, involve senses other than sight or discernment through dialogues and the presentation of situations, For Adina Pintilie it becomes her greatest challenge. The eyes lead to the bodies, the hands lead us to touch through the expression of our own scruples with which the director plays through her characters. Masturbating bodies, bodies that are palpated, that hit each other, that incite or repel each other. Touch me not becomes, in this way, in pure physical experience.
And here arises another of the criticisms that some media made of this proposal. And of course, Those bodies that are explored quickly lead us to the human activity par excellence: Sex. With less virulence, in a more affectionate and careful tone, less ironic too, Lars Von Trier's cinema looms like a shadow over the Romanian director's film. Like in Nymphomaniac, The film takes us down the path of sexuality practiced openly., and here, as he was also criticized at the time, one might wonder about the timeliness of some passages, also excessively dilated, as if the director reveled in putting the viewer in a difficult situation that, in many cases, may be completely foreign to them. Are we talking about creative inquiry or mere exhibitionism? Without failing to consider the possibility that some viewers opt for the second option, We understand that the time that Pintilie dedicates to all this is necessary to generate the questions he wants to raise..
But where this stands out first work It's in the mix of genres. Let's think about the following: all the actors involved in this work, except Laura Benson, only professional actress, they play themselves. From here, a question arises: How do we rate a work of fiction in which the protagonists play characters who are like themselves?? Con Touch me not, Adina Pintilie covers a terrain that is difficult to classify and that will undoubtedly open new doors to the future of cinema. It's not exactly about making fiction out of reality.. Nor does it consist of inserting into fiction the forms of staging of documentaries.. What happens here is that reality is presented in the form of narrative fiction. Where does this miscegenation take us?? Are the lives we witness the lives of the people who interpret them or are they interpreting situations in which they are not really involved? The truth remains, So, questioned or doubted, dragging us down the slope of indefinition, immersed in an investigation that, as we said above, Maybe you don't want to directly resolve any of the questions that arise when watching the film.. He just wants, confused, Let's ask ourselves the right questions and, when making them, let's come to our own conclusions.
We said that Touch me not It's a movie about bodies.. Some bodies that, like Laura's, At the beginning of this experience they are withdrawn, collected in themselves. That withdrawal, that hugging oneself, avoiding the gaze and contact of others, They are just the symptoms. Trying to delve into the roots, Adina Pintilie points to certain psychoanalytic responses that may be necessary to understand the details of the path that Laura has to travel.. In accordance with the prevailing political logic, These causes point to an order that Pintilie understands that represses our instincts and passions.. But actually, Those explanations could well be the least of it in this case.. What matters is the journey, the challenge, the test, awareness and hence opening up to the world in contemporary societies that live as withdrawn as Laura herself. Victory is reflected in that opening of arms to receive the world without fear..
When I first saw Touch me not, The question I asked myself when I left the movie theater was what need would I have to revisit this film?. With the second viewing regarding its premiere in commercial theaters, I still don't have it too clear. There is no poetic look in Adina Pintilie's film that captivates me (in fact, Sometimes your grammar seems a bit redundant to me., and if, too cloying in that perhaps very obvious search for the intimate), I don't feel particularly involved by his speech either.. However, That still prevents me from understanding that this is a very necessary film.. An experience that I do not regret having had and that I encourage not to miss.. GERARDO LEON
