THE FIVE SENSES Reviewed 8/11/2000

Movies rarely have explicit morals, but this one does, emblazoned on its posters: "Nothing cures the soul like the senses. - Oscar Wilde." And when the movie is done, you will have explored this intriguing idea. Five main characters who live coincidentally close to one another in Toronto (and whose names all coincidentally begin with R) have each lost any emotional connection to one sense.

• Touch: a masseuse whose husband died two years earlier, who cannot hug her daughter.
• Taste: a cake designer who constructs elaborate inedible edifices.
• Smell, hearing, and sight, all are expressed.

And, through a single galvanizing event and its small cascading consequences, each of them is confronted with the emotional barrenness that has come from losing the feeling we normally associate with the physical senses.

In America, seeing and hearing are acknowledged senses, the others are not. Taste is personal, smell is unmentionable, and touch so intimate that we adults negotiate permission to touch another. Senses and sensuality are closely connected to sexuality. Perhaps appropriately for a movie drawn from a quote by twisted conflicted old Wilde, all of the characters have confused sexuality that is or has become divorced from love. Slowly - this is a three-indiglo movie, and at one point my eyes drifted closed - and with stately stasis, each descends, internally, to a point of despair. Then some are saved by their senses and some are betrayed by them.

I am being coy about the action because to reveal it would undercut the movie's subtle suspense and the way in which its stories creep up on you. Though the direction is stiff - many still head shots - and the dialog spare and thin on action ("what, no car chases?" as a sandwich-munching teamster asks incredulously in an indy-film promo we saw before the movie began), the acting is wonderfully delicate. Each of the unknowns (the movie's biggest name is Mary-Louise Parker) shows us a sense of depth. This movie respects its actors, the characters they play, and the audience. No one is drawn from stock. The movie demands that you pay attention. It will make you think. It will make you see differently. You may intermittently be bored but you will be engaged.

See it. Go.

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith