Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Earlier this year Bob Ignizio expressed a marked lack of
enthusiasm for yet another art-house end-of-the-world movie. It wasn't
MELANCHOLIA - that one was good, evidently - it was some sort of genre relation
with lots of numbers in the title.
Well, just to show Bob that we feel his pain, and that he
doesn't have to suffer through every mopey, Sundance-acclaimed, Cedar
Lee-playing emo-type dramas about the end of the world from an average doomed
soul's POV, I'll dump all over PERFECT SENSE, yeah, even though it bids to be
more serious and grownup than the usual CGI zombie/meteor apocalypse.
The premise can't help but recall a movie I confess I
haven't seen - which is ironic in so many ways - the by-reputation-equally bleak
art-house drama BLINDNESS (2008), in which a plague of sightlessness struck a whole
city except for Joan Allen. Kick that idea up a couple notches, literally, and
you've got PERFECT SENSE. Untypical setting is Aberdeen , Scotland ,
where Michael (Ewan Macgregor) is a hardworking restaurant chef living near to
epidemiologist Susan (Eva Green). Their paths cross, fatefully, coincident with
the worldwide outbreak of a baffling new disease that Susan and her colleagues
haplessly investigate. It starts with an absence of smell, then a loss of taste
- the latter a real blow to the Michael's restaurant - and so on, apparently
progressing cruelly and inevitably to erasing all five senses.
Michael and Susan fall in love, though each has
contracted the condition, just like everyone else on the planet, apparently.
Further complicating their relationship is that with each new loss of sense
there's usually an uncontrollable emotional outburst (and severe hunger pang),
and during one of them Michael blows up at Susan for her inability to have
children. There seems no cure, no contagion-vectors, no answers to the bizarre
malady, and as deafness descends upon the land, can the two lovers reconcile in
time for oblivion?
Pretty glum stuff. I'd like to say self-important, though
I suppose if there were a disease gradually switching off all five senses for
everyone that would be pretty self-important, yes indeed. Still, the mystery
illness mainly comes across as a heavy-handed metaphor for...something or
other...with the background theme that with each new setback the human race
still struggles to adapt. "Life goes on," goes director David
Mackenzie’s mournful narration refrain.
Acting is good - meaning depressing. Though if you think
most epidemiologists look remotely like certified hottie Eva Green (or, if you're a female, you
think most struggling chefs look like Ewan Macgregor), well, okay, at least it’s
a great advert for the Aberdeen Convention & Visitors Bureau. Forgive my cynicism, but the
downbeat, dirge-like drama didn't thrill me all that much, even if the premise
is a bit haunting. Would I have preferred it had more kickass action and calculated crowd-pleasing elements like I AM
LEGEND and similar mainstream-Hollywood planetary-extinction fare? No, that
probably wouldn't have helped either.
I guess in the end PERFECT SENSE provides the sort of deep-thought
/pretentious head trip that used to be on the bill whenever something remotely
resembling a sci-fi or horror creature-feature got accepted at Sundance, or the
Cleveland International Film Festival (before post-modern irony and THE BLAIR
WITCH PROJECT made even Troma stuff acceptable fest fare). Okay, take it or
leave it. Life goes on, they say.
The idea of world-ending event from the helpless vantage of
innocent-civilian star-crossed lovers is still best rendered, in my humble
opinion, in the 1980s cult movie MIRACLE MILE. Anyone remember that nuclear
blast from the past? I think it unreeled in `real time,' too. Please tell me
there won't be a remake of that with Zac Efron and Demi Lovato. Or one of
PERFECT SENSE, either. (2 out of 4 stars)
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