Film Review: Touch Me Not

The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear, Adina Pintilie’s quasi-autobiographical film about sex and intimacy, Touch Me Not, suffers a simple logical fallacy. It believes that being naked, sexual or kinky inherently indicates honesty, vulnerability and emotional intelligence, and disallows posturing or shallowness. It quickly proves itself wrong.

The film is, at least, ambitious in its attempt to address intimacy, beauty and sexuality. Pintilie is an experimental filmmaker, and she plays herself while interviewing and filming different people as they address how they inhabit or avoid intimacy. Laura Benson plays Laura, the director’s muse/alter-ego, who embarks on a form of sexual tourism, speaking with sex workers, transgender people and BDSM enthusiasts in an attempt to exorcise her own emotional repression.

But there’s a level of objectification inherent in these interactions – and some of their “therapies” feel self-serving, performative, and not particularly enlightening. Scenes of Laura screaming repeatedly while being punched in the chest may have some Marina Abramovic-style primal rawness, but complex and enlightening it is not. The blur between reality and fiction further diminishes any sense of authenticity.

More successful is Pintilie’s exploration of beauty and intimacy for those with oft-ignored bodies. Filming a touch-yoga workshop (unnervingly set in a white room resembling an asylum), she focuses on Tómas, an alopecia sufferer, and Christian, who has spinal muscular dystrophy. A scene where Tudor discusses the intimacy of touching Christian’s malformed jaw is interesting in its exploration of the nature of discomfort. These discussions are far more interesting than the film’s predictable forays into sex clubs.

Touch Me Not proves that you can reveal a lot of the body while revealing very little of the self.

Out now

2.5/5