Losing your senses

Perfect Sense is a movie in which human beings lose their senses. Literally. First they lose the ability to smell, then the power to taste; by the time their hearing goes it becomes clear that the apocalypse is upon them. This independent film directed by David Mackenzie from a screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson is either brilliant or a load of fatuous hooey. It could be both, which is an achievement most filmmakers can only dream of.

In truth I had no intention of watching Perfect Sense. I was looking for a copy of Womb, a Hungarian movie in which Eva Green has her dead lover cloned, gives birth to the clone, and raises him to manhood. Does that make him her lover, or her son? If there is an actress who can bring this weirdness to life, it is Green.  

Womb was not available but Perfect Sense was. I’d never heard of it but it had a Sundance imprimatur and the poster shows Ewan McGregor and Eva Green kissing. Good enough for me — if the movie consisted entirely of kissing scenes it would at least star two performers who are talented, beautiful, and have no problem with full frontal nudity. (Michael Fassbender has… raised the bar on this current trend with his role in Shame.)

In Perfect Sense, a series of pandemics robs people of their senses. First they have emotional breakdowns in which they recall the past or are seized with the sort of profound longing that causes a lab technician to eat a live rabbit.

Then their sense of smell disappears, a catastrophic event that annihilates the perfume industry and makes it totally unnecessary to read Proust ever again. However, we don’t see the effects of worldwide olfactory loss; all we get is some narration over a bunch of still photos that look like the album covers of hipster bands we’d like to drown. 

Soon after that the sense of taste goes kaput, taking the careers of Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and every reality cooking show celebrity with it. People still eat, but as a restaurateur puts it, they are content with flour and fat. Oddly, the narrator did not mention the most predictable reaction to this catastrophe: mass suicide. 

So the human race faces apocalypse by sensory loss, which seems less horrific than a collision with a new planet or magnetic shifts that cause the earth to stop rotating, until you consider how you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life. Hint: Your vast movie and music collection will not be a comfort to you.

The protagonists are a beautiful epidemiologist (Green) who’s had bad boyfriends and a handsome chef (McGregor) who won’t let women stick around long enough to be his girlfriend. The epidemiologist lives above the restaurant where the chef cooks, which is convenient.

After the obligatory “meet cute” and the pointless resistance, they fall in love. The inability to smell and taste is an obvious metaphor for their romantic conduct, and for the general human condition, except that it’s too literal to be a metaphor.

Meanwhile the rest of the human race copes with sensory loss as best as it can: there’s a funny bit in which a food critic reviews the colors of his meal.

The filmmakers seem to grasp the essential absurdity of the material and work to keep it from straining the audience’s credulity. They don’t quite succeed, but the result is oddly entertaining. 

Perfect Sense reminds me of It’s All About Love (2003) by the Danish Dogme 95 director Thomas Vinterberg. Vinterberg had become the critics’ darling with his wonderfully caustic family drama Festen (The Celebration). His next project was about the coming apocalypse. The world would end not through global warming, nuclear war or any of the usual suspects. No, it would be terminated by the lack of love. This lack of love would cause gravity to stop working. Across the globe, people float off the ground like swamis gone wild. I’m not making this up.

It’s All About Love — an explanation that makes no sense whatsoever — is so fake-profound and preposterous, it’s actually entertaining. At first we tried to suppress our giggles, but the sight of Sean Penn’s face contorted with emotion made this impossible. And when people started rising into the air, we became hysterical. I confess that I saw It’s All About Love at the cinema twice, and both times I laughed so hard I developed temporary abs.

Perfect Sense should’ve been a scream; the fact that it isn’t is a testament to the skill of Green and McGregor.

It is silly, engaging, and about as apocalyptic as breaking a nail. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a “Huh?”