The Five Senses Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)August 13th, 2000
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
Jeremy Podeswa’s The Five Senses could have been a gimmicky mess, but the writer/director’s film about five people who each have one wayward sense is a remarkable triumph of filmmaking. Like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue, which focused on each of the Ten Commandments, Senses' subtle approach doesn’t hit you over the head. With five interwoven stories that border on the ironically tragic playing out over a three-day period, Senses plays like Magnolia directed by Atom Egoyan.
Richard (Philippe Volter, who was in Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique) is an ophthalmologist who is slowly going deaf. His neighbor Ruth (Gabrielle Rose, who was in Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter) is a massage therapist who can’t manage to touch her daughter Rachel (Nadia Litz) emotionally. Rachel, an ugly-duckling teen dropout in search of her own identity, is a bit of a voyeur, but can’t manage to keep her eyes on a three-year-old left in her charge. Bisexual housecleaner Robert (Daniel MacIvor, Beefcake) thinks he can smell love and arranges meetings with all of his former lovers to sniff out a lifemate. Robert’s best friend Rona (Mary-Louise Parker, Goodbye Lover) makes intricately designed cakes that taste like cardboard.
The stories are pulled together by the disappearance of the three-year-old (Elise Francis Stolk). The most interesting of the five stories involves Rona’s relationship with Roberto (Marco Leonardi), an Italian chef she met while vacationing in Europe. As Senses opens, Roberto is coming to visit the skeptical and suspicious Rona, who believes that he may be using her to gain citizenship. Roberto can’t speak English, and Podeswa doesn’t subtitle his dialogue until the end of the film so, like Rona, you never know his true intentions.
It’s fun trying to guess which character matches each particular sense. When you first see Richard the eye doctor, you assume he’ll handle the sense of sight tale (he doesn’t). When Ruth is shown giving massages, you assume that her story will feature the sense of touch (she does, but not in the conventional way). I also enjoyed the way that Podeswa begins the film inside of a deprivation chamber in Ruth’s office.
Senses was named Best Canadian Feature Film at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival (the film was shot in and around Toronto), and was nominated for nine Genie Awards (the Canandian equivalent of the Oscar) where Podeswa took home the trophy for Best Director. Senses was elegantly lensed by cinematographer Gregory Middleton (Better Than Chocolate) and features a handsome, haunting score from Alexina Louie and Alex Pauk (Last Night).
1:44 - R for adult situations and adult language
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