“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
--Oscar Wilde
If you had to lose one of your senses forever, which would you choose? Perhaps more telling might be this question: if you could retain but one sense, which would it be? Your choice would reveal the seat of your passions and ultimately, as Wilde implies, more than a little bit about your soul. In The Five Senses, director Jeremy Podeswa presents five interconnected stories, each one dominated by a character’s infatuation with one of our five senses. Out of the material we spy the spiritual, as each character’s obsessions reveal intimate secrets about their essence.
Cinematographer Greg Middleton captures the textual sensuality of the characters, their art and architecture. Podeswa’s visual style is clearly influenced by fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, as The Five Senses has the same studied, deliberate pace and radiates a similar coolness and emotional distance.
Podeswa’s film studies the impact that the unexpected and unknown have on relationships. One of these relationships, between the angelically named masseuse Ruth Seraph (Gabrielle Rose) and her client Anna Miller (Molly Parker), whose daughter disappears in a city park, is reminiscent of the familial struggles of Ian Holm’s character in Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. However, the most captivating story involves Richard (Philippe Volter gives an achingly touching performance), an opthamologist with a passion for music. Tragically, he is also going deaf. His quest to accumulate a mental databank of sounds to carry with him in his deafness causes him to reprise a relationship that leads to unexpected and wondrous discoveries. Other stories, such as that of Rona (Mary Louise Parker) the cake decorator, whose creations look beautiful but taste bland, and her best friend Robert (Daniel MacIvor), who claims he can smell love, but hasn’t been able to sniff it out lately, are intriguing, but somewhat underdeveloped.
The film’s ubiquitous reminders of the missing child speak of the child missing in many of our selves – the child in us that engages the world with a sense of amazement and wonder on a moment by moment basis. The child represents the part of us that is able to discern meaning and intense pleasure out of what poet Haniel Long called youth’s “sensual phosphorescence.”
The Five Senses is a touching, sensually provocative film, and another notch in the impressive belt of contemporary Canadian filmmaking.
