Perfect Sense (2012)

Who payed the critics

As Good As It Gets

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This is not a love story, this is not a contagion story, this is an insanely, painfully beautiful, accurate and honest depiction of what it means to be human. Of what keeps humanity afloat despite all the shit and hatred surrounding us. This movie helps to stay sane in this insane world, to not lose track of truly important things, all the things beyond fat and flour (you'll get that last bit once you watch it).This movie is timeless. You will cry at the end. But you will smile doing it. And if you have someone to hug, make sure they are around. You'll really need a hug after it, you'll really need to feel connected to someone. (if you're human, that is)

A horrible combination of psychological weakness and intellectual limitation. I love the scene when a butcher tries eating a whole raw lamb, the meaningless conversations and the unpredictable moments of crying. I don't know, what exactly is the target group of this movie. The movie hints a latent warning about the end of humanity but somehow it manages to be an askew trumpet blast announcing the end of human creativity in itself. An extremely bad movie, director and "playwriter" are helped by a recommendation to stop working in these fields and start doing something with less visibility such as designing air puzzle or tasting watermelon wine in some Siberian countryside. I am sure somebody will organize for them a work visa.

The log-line of "Perfect Sense" (directed by David Mackenzie) makes the movie sound gimmicky at best. "A chef and a scientist fall in love as an epidemic begins to rob people of their sensory perceptions"? Aside from imminent sentimentality, this description signalled to me the inevitable deployment of a cheap trick. Yet with Eva Green and Ewan McGregor leading the cast, I thought, give me a taste of the maudlin gimmick.Susan (Green) is an epidemiologist working on this sense-subtracting disease that begins with a few cases and ends up a pandemic. Michael (McGregor) is a talented chef at a high-end restaurant that shares an alley with Susan's apartment. Both characters are self-admitted assholes who fall in unlikely love while this affliction deconstructs their very personhood (along with everyone else's on the planet). I don't need to tell you to balk at my description if I've made the movie sound less watchable than the log-line has. Yet I will say that you'll be missing out if, based on any blurb, you dismiss this movie entirely. "Perfect sense" is a gem that increases in value the longer you look at it. "And what are we really?" it seems to ask. "A number of perceptual senses linked to a narrow spectrum of underlying emotions?" That's one suggestion it communicates before adding: "You've gotta love that." Prior to losing each sense, victims of this disease experience an uncontrollable surge of emotion: despair before losing smell, ravenousness before taste, rage before hearing, and, ushering in the loss of sight, all-encompassing love and hope. Darkness at last consumes all victims while blindly and silently they cling to loved ones whom they can also neither smell nor taste. Left with only the ability to feel the person beside them, all await the final subtraction (touch) that can only render them lifeless. Two of the many interesting things about this apocalyptic movie are the disease that sense-by-sense disassembles people, and the adaptive measures people take in order to cope with their ensuing condition. Those who can no longer taste begin to describe food in terms of texture, consistency or with onomatopoeia while artists attempt to reintroduce or at least remember flavor through music. So in a sense, synesthesia becomes a short-term savior. Though the movie provides much food for thought, at heart it's a love story between Susan and Michael. Remember that. Whether or not their love burgeons as a result of the apocalypse doesn't matter. We don't know what causes the disease. Is it environmental? Manmade? Gaia? Aliens? We never find out, so in that respect there's no didacticism. Neither are we subjected to some cornball yarn about love transcending space and time. The more existential and less literal question we're left with as a result is: Really, though, what else of any significance is there? I'm reminded of "Poem" by Al Purdy, particularly its last line: "there is nothing at all I can do except hold your hand and not go away." The sense of helplessness Purdy conveys when the narrator tries to console an ill loved one, a time when nothing can be done for someone other than to provide a loving presence, is nothing if not touching to the reader because of its understated, pragmatic truth: love, whatever magic it isn't, sustains us. It's sustenance. In the same vein, "Perfect Sense" isn't saying that love intensifies as the disease progresses. It isn't claiming that with all distractions removed love can be seen for what it is, all-important. Thanks for sparing us those sentiments by the way. Something of what the movie does say is that love, nurturing, care, warmth, whatever you want to call it, as we slowly fall apart, is the one thing we can still manage to express with each, however limited, piece of ourselves we have left—and right up until removal of our last sense snuffs us out. Potentially, perhaps coincidentally, yet for certain thankfully, love also happens to be all we need in perilous times like these. And if that's gimmicky then so are we.

Awesome. Can't believe I missed it when it came out, let alone missed hearing about it. As four years have gone by, there'e nothing I can add to the enthusiastic raves for PERFECT SENSE so my Comment will be little more than a strong recommendation to serious film buffs to not miss this film. Whether or not you consider yourself a film critic, this is not an "art" film. What appears to have disappointed those who canned P-S is the minimal treatment of the science fiction vehicle driving the love story core; i.e., just enough treatment to make the "epidemic" plausible enough so we can grasp the presence and impact of human emotions, resilience, desire and needs. The same can be said of UNDER THE SKIN, a more recent film which, like P-S, hit only a niche audience and was panned by the science fiction geeks looking for INDEPENDENCE DAY. Both films use science fiction merely as a vehicle though ordinary humanity is at the heart of both.