philosoraptor42 | Two films I didn't finish....

Last night I came home from work and decided to sit down in front of a movie. I picked "The Conformist". A film I'd picked up because I'd missed it when it was advertised at an art cinema where I used to live. I was actually quite excited about this one. As it turned out, it was VERY seventies. A fair bit of sex, men talking together in serious tones, beautiful shots of little happening, the main character being driven around in the back of black cars. I was pretty tired so there were a number of points where I fell asleep and I may have been missing some of the context as a result.

The Conformist is about a man who is hired to kill for the facists, but he's not entirely sure that he supports them. When he's hired, he's told that their contractors more often do the work for the money rather than because they believe in the cause, but he's different because he does the work for neither reason. He takes the job because, it seems to be suggested, he wants to fit in. It's an odd theme repeated throughout what I saw of the film, yet I never felt terribly convinced by it.

Another aspect of the film is his relationship with his odd ditzy fiancee. Yeah sure, she's pretty, but I didn't really feel much investment in their relationship and the long drawn out scenes of them together really put me off. Meanwhile scenes of our main character actually killing people seemed to have barely any build up at all.

I should probably watch this film again when I'm not inclined to fall asleep every ten minutes, but from everything I saw of the film (and I managed to watch the beginning without any gaps), I'm having a hard time persuading myself to put it back in the DVD player.

Then this morning I checked out "Perfect Sense", a sci-fi movie starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green. I'd heard that this was about an incurable disease that caused people to lose their senses. Right from the start things didn't bode well when a narrator started poetically talking about ordinary life in a way that sounded like one of those ultra-serious advertisements. If this was just at the beginning it would be fine, but after the third narration section it was really becoming unbearably annoying.

The only issue the disease is causing to start with is for people to lose their sense of smell. This is particularly difficult for Ewan McGregor's character who is a chef at a restaurant. When the disease starts spreading to the majority of people, how can they persuade people to spend money at a restaurant? What does it mean for someone who has spent their whole life devoted to picking out subtle flavours when he too starts losing this sense?

Unfortunately the film doesn't spend much time exploring the characters' situations before shifting quickly to another narration scene. This time the narration tells us that the disease is hitting people all around the world (which we'd actually been told already within the story itself, so whatever), while in the background we are shown various random people who we don't know collapsing to their knees in tears. I thought the narration was being done by Eva Green's character, but it didn't seem to match up with how she'd been talking in the main body of the film. It turns out that the narration is done by Kathryn Engels who has no part to play in the main story.

So, back to the "loss of smell" epidemic. I know at least two people IRL, possibly more, who have pretty much no sense of smell. It's not the end of the world. I can see how realising that you will never smell anything again might be upsetting particularly when its caused by a bizarre disease that is not fully understood, however if they wanted me to care about this, they needed to put it into context. The narration shows us people breaking down in fits of tears at the loss of their sense of smell long before we are shown the emotional effect on the actual main characters. As such, when major characters burst into tears from their loss of smell, it's just another example of what we saw in the narrated sections and nothing special.

In the third narration section we are told that losing your sense of smell means you no longer have the connections to memories those smells produce. Bizarrely one example is that a particular smell might remind you of "a childhood fear of cows". Random.... Now excuse me, imagine if this film was about everyone randomly losing the ability to walk. Everyone in the entire world has to go around in wheelchairs and they are all mourning their inability to walk and their memories of how they used to run happily though fields of barley or whatever... Wouldn't we all instantly recognise how excruciatingly insulting this was to people who cannot walk anyway?

The point which finally led me to switch the movie off was when a street musical act was using violin sounds to remind people of lost smells. Give me a break!

Rather than this I would much rather recommend "Children Of Men" where we get a real sense of the feelings of those in this strange vision of the future, we can see how the scenario has genuine important consequences, we see those consequences in the characters we are following and finally when people are obsessing over what they have lost ("Children of Men" starts with a news broadcast about the death of the youngest remaining human being) the main character is appropriately cynical about it.

So yes, when I'm barely able to appreciate the shock-value of losing the sense of smell, when narration is denying me the chance to share the experience with the characters, when the worst result of the epidemic appears to be a lack of interest in fancy restaurants and when people cannot seem to recognise the stupidity in representing their lost sense of smell through violin sounds, that's when I completely give up on the whole thing.

The synopsis said that the epidemic meant people were losing their senses and I thought it was interesting to imagine the whole of the human race dying of a terminal illness at once. Having to deal with how they will leave the world behind knowing that there may be no one left at the end, even losing all connection to the world around them. I thought it could be pretty miserable, but I was sure Ewan McGregor could guide me through it. I was fairly open to whatever the film had in store, but what it actually presented me with was so petty and poorly represented that I couldn't bear to keep going with it.