Touch Me Not

CinemaSerf5/10

Sep 1, 2024

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...or perhaps just "Watch Me Not"? In theory this could have made for quite an interesting look at just how different people deal with intimacy - emotional and the more tactile variety. To that end we spend an over-long two hours in the company of "Laura" (Laura Benson) whose proclivities, attitudes and remarkable recoil and roaring abilities are demonstrated, as are those of her subjects."Tómas" (Tómas Lemarquis) and "Christian" (Christian Bayerlein). Much of this is relayed through a series of scenes with a very much more participative analyst than many in "Hanna" (Hanna Hofmann) who is a transexual but that's neither here nor there to this meandering exercise in soft-porn introspection disguised as "insight". What simply doesn't work is the sheer amount of pointless verbosity, from start to finish, that ensures that this takes on more of a lecture (or documentary) for the curiously prurient than an engaging drama. Auteur Adina Pintilie (who also features here) obviously has a message she wished to convey, but she didn't establish enough distance between the reality and the fiction of this production to enable me know just what she's getting at. Everyone has boundaries, and these are not consistent - either personally, emotionally or physically - so what's the point of taking this rather monotonically simplistic approach to human nature and suggesting it's going to induce empathy. Baring the soul isn't always an easy thing to watch, but when you are this detached from the subject matter is just becomes too observational. I felt like I was sitting in on conversations that were none of my business between people about whom I couldn't really care less. By half way through I was looking at the cinema ceiling wondering if I could ever find myself - or my peccadilloes - interesting enough to put on display in such a contrived and unnatural fashion. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but this falls uncomfortably between half an dozen stools and was wasted on me, sorry.