Watched: Perfect Sense

It's taken me forever to write about this movie because I was so perturbed by not only the way its story unfolds but by its ending that I wasn't really sure what to write. I looked up some of the critical response and people generally seem to think it was well-made but heavy-handed since Eva Green's character delivers a very literal voice-over throughout the movie to explain the proceedings. But I would argue that I found the nrration really important, even though I don't generally enjoy them during my movie (just let me watch it happen myself, dammit!) because 1. her voice is beautiful and 2. her character can be somewhat enigmatic, and I think her narration has just the right emotion to help us fully understand her and what's happening to her. And by extension, the other characters in the film.

Okay, so, ahead be spoilers. Because in order to explain why I was so affected by this film I've gotta basically tell you what happens. So if you want to watch the film without knowing beforehand what happens, go watch! Then come back.

 Eva Green is this cynical, fairly angry epidemiologist who at the beginning of the film has just discovered she can't have children. We get a weird scene at her work place where they have a guy quarantined who experienced an overwhelming sensation of sadness followed by a loss of smell. That's it. It's strange and there are other cases popping up around the UK/world but Green and the other doctors are stumped so in the end they let him go, and we move on. We meet Ewan McGregor, a rakish chef whose kitchen's back door opens onto the same alley as Eva's apartment window. Okay, so it's all very convenient but they end up flirting and then one day he offers to cook for her after hours. She is eating when all of sudden she is hit by the sadness, and he helps her across the alley back to her apartment. But then he is hit just as suddenly by the sadness, so they end up spending the night together crying and comforting each other. The next morning they both wake with no sense of smell and a big sense of awkwardness, and they leave it at that.

So, the whole world is without smell. Which affects McGregor's job, obviously, but they adapt, season the food with mass quantities of spices and flavors, and move on. And then when people experience a burst of ravenous hunger (seriousky a disgusting montage but very effective) it's followed by a loss of taste, and he and his partners must adapt again. Okay, no taste, but after a week or so people still want to continue their lives so they start making food focused solely on textures. And people keep coming.

During this time the romance between McGregor and Green's characters is developing, and it's kind of your standard indie romance. They're both damaged people, McGregor at the start of the film obviously has lots of intimacy issues and Green has a lot of anger over her infertility. But it's really well-acted by both of them and I think it draws you in really effectively. You care about these two, you keep thinking how sad it is that this romance is only just happening to them now, at what seems to be the end times.

The next sense to go is sound, the loss of which is preceded by an INTENSE fit of rage. After McGregor experiences it and lashes out at Green, abusing her verbally, she flees to her office which is in ruins. As she's fleeing there are a lot of riots and the city starts to really reflect the chaos of people waking up, finally realizing what is happening to them, everything they are losing. And also people who can't control themselves because of the rage, or for whom the fit has passed but they've given up all hope and are descending into despair. Green's office is a mess and she can't communicate with the people who are there. She tries to work but then the fit overcomes her and while she is lashing out, destroying her office we see McGregor calling her, apologizing, hopelessly immobilized in his home. All people who have lost their hearing are quarantined to their homes.

But life goes on. They're basically broken up at this point, trying to go on living the best they can without smell, taste, or hearing. McGregor's restaurant is hired by the city to make food packages- just bland pasta- to give to people who can't leave their homes. Some people are preparing for the possibility of blindness. Some are giving up. Some just keep going for lack of knowing what else to do. Finally, the moment comes: overwhelming euphoria, followed by blindness. McGregor and Green experience this almost simultaneously, but across the city from each other. They have the same exact moment of realization, and try to make their way towards each other. Honestly, watching this, I was agonizing over the possibility that they might not find each other in time. So I think the movie wins, in that sense. I was totally invested. Because once sight is gone, and they can't hear or taste or smell, what else will they have? Not long to live, probably. Not much to live for. The world destroyed. 

I've already warned of spoilers, so I'll just finish this retelling of the story: they find each other. And then the screen goes black. And we're left to wonder just what would become of a world where people have no more senses, no way of returning to the living of life as they have tried to after every other loss of sense. The narrator suggests, right before the end, that this is the end of the world as humans know it. She says, "People prepare for the worst but hope for the best. They concentrate on the things that are important to them, all the things beyond the fat and flour. Once we thought of the ice age as something that crept up, glaciers slowly spreading, temperatures gradually dropping, but recently a number of intact mammoths have been discovered with their stomachs full of undigested grass. The cold must have hit them like a blow from a club. That's how the darkness descends upon the world."

Is the film overwrought? Are the elements of romance and apocalypse at times incongruous, are the various strands of the story occasionally at odds with each other? Maybe. But in the end this story got to me, and I fell 100% for all its tricks. It's sad, and creative, and sort of inspirational in a way that I don't often find films to be. I even cried at the end. It's also beautifully filmed and again, while some may tire of the narrator helpfully, sometimes quite dramatically explaining the events unfolding, or of the montages showing the havoc each loss of sense wreaks upon the world, I thought it helped pull the story out of the microcosm it was creating to show both the macro of such a complete, irreversible and total doomsday scenario.

What I am trying to say is that I liked this movie a lot, artsy affectations and all. That's it. I liked it. Good movie, will watch again in 10 years once I am done being saddened by this viewing.