|
 
Scents and sensitivity
A man looking for the smell of love, a baker of beautiful but bad-tasting cakes, and an eye doctor trying to hear all he can before he goes deaf are among the interesting characters in "The Five Senses."
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
Rona is telling her best friend, Robert, about the great guy she met on vacation in Italy — he's so gorgeous and romantic andÊ.Ê.Ê.
|
| | | THE FIVE SENSES | Written and directed by: Jeremy Podeswa.
Cast: Mary-Louise Parker, Pascale Bussieres, Richard Clarkin, Brendan Fletcher, Marco Leonardi, Nadia Litz, Daniel MacIvor, Molly Parker, Gabrielle Rose, Tara Rosling, Philippe Volter, Elise Francis Stolk, Clinton Walker.
Cinematography: Gregory Middleton.
In English and French with English subtitles.
Related links: Official site |
|
Robert interrupts her, getting right to the point: "But how does he smell?" he asks.
Robert (Daniel MacIvor, incidentally the author of the terrific play Never Swim Alone, currently off-Broadway) is one of the five characters blessed or cursed with too much or too little of one of the senses. He's become convinced he can smell love, and he embarks on a project to sniff all his former boyfriends and girlfriends just to check whether he overlooked (oversmelled?) his true love somewhere along the way.
Rona has her own sensual problem: She's a baker who makes elaborate specialty cakes for weddings and parties that dazzle the recipients — but, all who try them agree, taste like sawdust. Besides these two, there's an eye doctor who's losing his hearing and decides to take time off of work so he can create a "library of sounds" in his mind. There's a massage therapist who has blocked out much of the world around her since a family tragedy but luxuriates in touching her clients. And there's a teenage girl whose problem with the sense of sight is ill-defined, but it leads her to lose track of a young child while she's busy watching something else; the search for the child is an ongoing theme throughout the movie.
Some may find this film a little slow-moving and its plot developments sometimes seem contrived to fit into the five-sense premise, but there is a lot to think about both while you watch it and after it's over. During the film, you'll probably think in a new way about the sounds and the music, the look of places and people, how much or little you take note of the scents and sensations of daily life. And in this way, "The Five Senses" can become one of those movies that stays with you long after you've left the theater, subtly affecting the way you appreciate the world around you.
|
AUGUST 21, 2000
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
Reader comments on The Five Senses:
Post a comment on "The Five Senses"
|
|
|
