PERFECT SENSE – d. David Mackenzie, UK/Sweden/Denmark/Ireland, 2011

This is another film I watched on a long-haul flight, so the viewing conditions were hardly great. However, as far as I could tell, despite my initial scepticism as I started watching it and realised what it was ‘about’, it ended up being a surprisingly intriguing and moving film that I really enjoyed, and actually did feel moved by.

Both Ewan McGregor (Michael) and Eva Green (Susan) are excellent, and the cast overall works well. I could’ve done without the setting up of Susan and Michael as hopeless singles who are nonetheless destined to fall in love, and generally felt the start of the film was quite rocky. It does, though, quickly move to being more convincing and more engaging, and when the futility of Susan’s job (contrasted with the initial way Michael and his colleagues start to address what’s happening to people) becomes evident, the film takes on more depth: no explanation is offered for what happens to people’s senses, and the emphasis is very much on how different people respond to it, and what it might ‘mean’ in a more existential, or even ontological, sense. It is in that way I think more interesting than other films about the actual or potential end of the world as we know it – from disaster films to zombie films to something such as Signs (d. M. Night Shyamalan, 2002) – and also does more (at least on film) with ideas around different senses and synaesthesia than does even an interesting film such as Blindness (d. Fernando Meirelles, 2008). Its focus on everyday, mundane things such as what we eat - and how important taste is to us, and how it's in fact far from mundane when it's taken from us, and how people realise that and cope with it - well, that alone is probably worth watching this film for, especially as what we eat is used as a pwerful metaphor for all sorts of other aspects of our existence, the environment and bodies within which we exist, and our attitudes towards them. ("Fat and flour", indeed!)

The poignancy of the ending works, which surprised me, even as I’d been drawn in as the film goes along: it was not quite the ending I expected, and was all the more powerful for that. The whole film, in retrospect, was thoughtful and engaging and makes one think about the importance of our particular ways of being embodied in the world, and what might happen – literally and metaphorically – when we mess too much with the world in which we have to be embodied, in order to be.