Flawed But Fearless Berlin Golden Bear Winner ‘Touch Me Not’ [Transilvania Review]

We are not used to the kind of directness that Adina Pintilie‘s debut, “Touch Me Not,” deals in, and it fires its opening salvo early. After a short prologue, the film begins with a lingering macro shot drifting down a human body. Hairs, pores, tiny puckers and little pouches in the skin are all bristlingly visible in the sterile, bleached light before the camera idly moves on and takes in the man’s flaccid penis, nestling between his thighs. These are far from the last genitalia we’ll see, but for all the sexual frankness, the more telling body shot comes later, when two lovers dreamily discuss the difference between their belly buttons: This is a film literally, figuratively, and wholly unapologetically, dedicated to navel-gazing.

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Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it. And, as the generally aghast reaction to its big win in Berlin suggests, it may very well succeed. But there is also something jaggedly admirable about its messy, sincere daring – the way it willfully bares its neck for those critical fangs, its defiant vulnerability. Like the bodies it champions, “Touch Me Not” is far from flawless. But like a scar, deformity or blemish, what makes it deviate from the norm is also what makes it unique. And anyway, in the words of Christian Bayerlein – not the film’s lead but maybe its hero and a man severely physically disabled due to spinal muscular atrophy – “Fuck the norm.”

Though mediated through layers of metatextuality (Pintilie herself appears as the unsmiling, asymmetrically-coiffed interviewer in one of the film’s less successful conceits), roughly, it follows Laura (Laura Benson), a middle-aged English woman with intimacy issues and an aversion to physical contact. She tries to work towards a breakthrough with a transgender sex worker (Hanna Hoffman) and a bearded sex coach (Seani Love). An exchange with the latter occasions one of the film’s only jokes when Seani asks to taste Laura’s tears, explaining he has “a fetish for tears.” “Ah, you lack salt,” Laura replies, and for a second we glimpse the real, warm woman underneath all the cooling layers of Pintilie’s insistently serious gaze.

In parallel, there’s Tómas (Tómas Lemarquis), who lost all the hair from his body at age 13 and is now, as an adult, as bald and handsome as a tailor’s mannequin. Clad in ascetic white like in “THX1138” or an early ’90s synth-pop video, Tómas is participating in some sort of body-acceptance therapy workshop, in an equally clinical setting (most of the film unfolds in a never-never limbo of whites and neutrals). His strong, lean physique provides an undeniable contrast with the malformed limbs and facial features of his workshop partner Christian (Bayerlein), whose face Tómas is directed to explore with his fingers. His halting description of his initial reaction of reluctance is a strong example of the good Pintilie is seeking to do here: for any audience member who may have felt the same, it does not exonerate us for the unkindness of that instinctual reaction but forces us to examine our impulse to look away from, and so to reject, the physiques we’re hardwired to see as abnormal.

“Touch Me Not” is most successful and provocative when it is talking about intimacy and body image in scenes like this (and the conversations between Laura and Hanna), outside of the direct context of sex. The actual act itself seems to cloud Pintilie’s judgment, most disastrously in an awful, potentially self-sabotaging sequence, in which all her characters, including the thinly drawn, beautiful ex-girlfriend of Tomas whom he is stalking, gather in a fetish club. Suggesting that any of them might experience some sort of catharsis by goggling at strobe-lit strangers writhing around in rope and latex is not only facile, but it also flows directly counter to the film’s more delicate and more valuable observations: Intimacy is not a kink, and fetishizing non-standard body types is not the same as accepting them.

There are times, too, when the sense of rarefied self-involvement becomes almost too much to bear. Though Laura’s problem is clearly deep-rooted (darkly hinted to have something to do with her father, now an old man ailing in hospital in yet another sterile white room) one can’t help but wonder if she really is broken enough to require quite so much fixing; or conversely if she has any other worries in her life besides this one. Pintilie’s artificial universe being what it is, the ordinary business of living, such as going to work or having a sandwich, are alien concepts: Who on earth has the leisure to be this monotheistically dedicated to the great God of self-love? Does no one here ever need to take the bins out?

Somehow, though, the film is no more ashamed of these weaknesses than Christian is of his disability or Hanna is of her gender-non-conforming body, and in all cases that frank self-belief is infectious and self-fulfilling. Watching “Touch Me Not” at the Transilvania International Film Festival on Pintilie’s home turf of Romania also brought home the film’s peculiar, utterly unique mix of brazenness and sensitivity. Here’s a first-time female filmmaker setting up her stall in the shadow of one of the best defined and most successful national cinemas of recent decades, (though the film is in English) striking a highly original tone far outside anything recognisably Romanian New Wave, and framing her project with unabashed (sometimes misplaced) experimental confidence. And yet, this auteurist work is an examination of shame and vulnerability, a forthright investigation of self-loathing, and, especially compared to the empty, egocentric provocations of, for example, Lars von Trier‘s “The House that Jack Built,” a radically sincere attempt to generate empathy from disgust. It is disconcerting, scattershot and it overreaches by roughly the circumference of the globe, but what does “Touch Me Not” coach if not how to look at something glaringly imperfect and see something beautiful? [B]