The
Five Senses
Rated
R
Opens
Friday,
Sept. 1
Jeremy Podeswa's
previous feature film Eclipse was released in 1994
to mixed reviews.
Further cinematic
proof that Canadian culture is more than just Celine Dion
and You Can't Do That on Television: Atom
Egoyan's Exotica and Denys Arcand's The Decline
of the American Empire, both available for rental.
One of the most edifying things about movies is the filmmaker's
ability to isolate a moment of life and bring to it a sense
of hyper-reality--a heightened insight and awareness. People
in emotional distress are rarely as beautiful or exquisitely
articulate as characters in a Bergman picture, but one of
cinema's nobler functions is to transform real-life pain
by gracefully foregrounding it on the silver screen.
Canadian writer/director Jeremy Podeswa may not be a Bergman
just yet, but his most recent feature, The Five Senses,
is a good, engaging case in point.
The film follows the struggles of a group of multifarious
Toronto residents with an empathetic but restrained, often
languid eye. An optometrist (Three Colors: Blue's
Philippe Volter) discovers he's going deaf, a cake-baker
(Mary-Louise Parker) is too hesitant as she takes a chance
on love, a house cleaner (Daniel MacIvor) has a nose for
olfactory metaphor, and a self-employed masseuse (The
Sweet Hereafter's Gabrielle Rose) clashes with her bookish,
voyeuristic teenage daughter (Nadia Litz). While creating
his characters, Podeswa was influenced by Robert Altman,
John Sayles, Woody Allen and photographer Nan Goldin, all
of whom he views as "sophisticated filmmakers who also tell
stories about human beings and really care about their characters."
The camera moves slowly through the film's spacey exteriors
and the almost-fussy interiors with a sense of privileged
emotional voyeurism. Podeswa's Toronto is a calm, pretty-but-alienating
place, the perfect backdrop for these people's problems--ranging
from the everyday loneliness of being single in a big city
to the urgent crisis of a missing child--which all unfold
in an intimate, nearly stoic manner, belying the despair,
neuroses and misfortunes that imbue their lives.
"I actually started first with the senses thing, rather
than starting with a main character or a plot line," says
Podeswa. "I was really starting with an intellectual idea
or a metaphor, and it became a little bit of a challenge
to find a dynamic story that would elaborate on the issues
that I wanted to explore."
The five senses theme subtly surfaces throughout (which
becomes too precious at times--let us never hear the line
"It smells like love" uttered in a film again), and is finally
an ambiguous signifier of hope. Our ability to touch, taste,
see, smell and hear, the film points out, is the only thing
allowing us to connect with the world outside ourselves.
As the characters appreciate their senses anew, they find
answers--sometimes refreshing, quietly radical ones--to
their conundrums.
Podeswa is convinced that the isolation and loneliness
experienced by his own characters in The Five Senses
are symptomatic of modern life. "I think it is something
that's a modern condition, or maybe a natural condition
that's exacerbated by the modern condition. I think that
as technology progresses, as our lives become more impersonalized
in a certain way, the danger is that we become more removed
from each other," says Podeswa. "There are too many diversions,
too many things to separate us from
other people."
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