Life is queer at its core
#IDFA2018: Touch Me Not (2018, 125'), Adina Pintilie
Touch Me Not, Adina Pintilie’s daring experiment, the Golden Bear-winner film of the 2018 Berlinale, took 7 years and a lot of labor to make, and it also takes some work to receive it. It employs actors and laymen to “play” — a version of — themselves in a handful of loosely connected fictitious scenarios, in order to more closely observe reality. It may be called an experimental essay film with elements of a documentary, but it cares little about making the distinctions regarding its genre. Its way of exploring intimacy, sexuality, the human body, and challenging our preconceptions about them is rarely seen on the big screen. Easily received as provocative, it is more like an invitation. I stumble when I write this but probably: an invitation for healing.
The film’s main character is Laura Benson, a Paris-based English actress (Dangerous Liaisons). Her character is led through a series of pseudo-sexual encounters in order to heal her undefined trauma also hinted at by a dying, mute father. A washed-out layer of fiction is created as a safety net to observe instant changes in the psyche under it, which I find the core of the film. This did not happen without any risk as the director highlights it in every interview fortifying the reality aspect of the film. Pintilie also appears in the film as kind of a documentarist, mostly through the back screen of an interrotron, an interview device well-known from Errol Morris films.
Laura, the tool of the unlearning process of the director, pays to sex-workers to challenge her character’s limited capability for intimacy. The sex-workers, a beer-bellied, classical music enthusiast German transsexual woman, and Seani Love, a known Australian-born touch therapist, perform their real-life jobs authentically to deliberate Laura from her distress with more or less success as well as challenge the stereotypical images of the sex-worker — aka prostitute.
The two other important guiding figures and reference points in the film are the androgynous Tómas Lemarquis, known Icelandic actor, and Christian Bayerlein, German political activist who lives with severe disability, or as he puts in the film, “different ability.” For Laura’s character, Tómas is the “way” and Christian is the desired state of non-dualist — say, healthy — body perception. The interactions between the two men are amongst the most elevated points of the film.
The film relies on the groundbreaking sexual fantasy theory of psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Bader, which holds that rather than being programmed by biology or society, sexual fantasies and preferences are really psychological antidotes to unconscious dangers. Instead of being suppressed, they may be expressed, in order to be evaded, and in fact, only until this expression does not hurt the other being. This is the primary message of the film, and yes, it kind of repositions the role of sex workers and sex clubs in society.
When asked in an interview whether her film’s narrative is “queer” Adina Pintilie replies that ‘At its core, life is queer.’ If you cannot relate to this statement, it may be one more reason to see this unique and wonderful film.
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