Another impressive addition to David Mackenzie’s increasingly intriguing filmography (we’re choosing to forget You Instead), his arthouse sci-fi romance Perfect Sense is a beautiful, odd and immersive exploration of intimacy during a possible End of Days.
An awkward one-night stand introduces our two leads. Cold and arrogant, womaniser Michael (Ewan McGregor) can have sex with women but not sleep with them, while Susan’s (Eva Green) cutting irony and self-criticism betray a crippling vulnerability barely concealed behind a defensive wall. However when a worldwide pandemic hits, slowly robbing people of their senses, these two damaged individuals turn to each other to find a sense of self.
The contagion is brilliantly handled and imbued with intriguing details, focusing not on widespread panic but the contained experience of individuals. Each onset of sensory deprivation is preceded by extreme, orgiastic episodes that highlight the sense’s role in the human experience, but are soon forgotten as people desperately seek to regain a sense of normalcy. As a chef, dependent on incorporating and accommodating the senses, Michael pragmatically switches his restaurant’s focus from taste to texture, colour and experience, becoming a symbol for resilience and hope.
Michael’s approach to his work is as innovative as Mackenzie’s, who intelligently and organically invokes sensory deprivation through the eradication of sound or the subtle heightening of colour. Avoiding the gimmicky feel of similarly-themed films such as Julia’s Eyes or Blindness, his approach is beautiful to experience and never detracts from the narrative flow.
Thought-provoking too is Michael and Susan’s relationship, which will divide romantics from cynics. Given the nudity-loving leads and the sensory-centred subject matter, sex becomes a major part of their relationship; the sole remaining carnal experience. However, McGregor and Green’s stunning and complex performances keep their characters’ motivations somewhat enigmatic – are they truly in love, or is their sensory loss a convenient outlet for their fear of intimacy; a way of maintaining distance even when together?
In an age where food is processed, memories are stored in Facebook photo albums and people tweet instead of talk, this beautiful, thought-provoking film inspires a personal examination of how much we actually connect to the world, and how much we take for granted.