Canada has long-been recognised as a fertile breeding ground for independent
cinema, and director Jeremy Podeswa is no exception. Richly textured and
beautifully crafted, The Five Senses is another example of that uniquely quirky sensibility found north of the American border.
In his debut film, Eclipse, Podeswa took a look at sexual obsessions in ten diverse people during the frenzied few days before a solar eclipse. This time round, his effort takes an abstract and prismatic view of each of the five senses over a similar and equally emotionally charged time. A gay cleaner with an acute sense of smell (Daniel MacIvor), a music-loving doctor who is losing his hearing (Philippe Volter), a widowed aromatherapy masseuse (Gabrielle Rose), a maker of designer cakes who can't bake (Mary-Louise Parker) and an unhappy, bespectacled sixteen-year old who can only watch from the sidelines of life (Nadia Litz): these are the characters whose
lives are explored over a period of three days during which the neighbourhood is galvanised over the disappearance of a little girl from the local park.
Once you've ticked of the characters in relation to the senses they
represent, you realise quite how ambitious a task it is to take so many
different elements, effectively delineate each one and keep the thing on
course as a whole. Podeswa's skilful plotting of each of these individual
stories is successful enough, but it is the over-riding theme about how
people perceive the world through their senses and how emotions (fear,
loneliness, insecurity) cloud that perception that unites the five tales.
The downside is that while focussing on these elements, Podeswa's film loses
momentum as a whole. Furthermore, with a limited amount of screen time each,
this set of strangely dislocated characters is largely uninvolving.
But with its perfectly pitched acting, sharply observed details, and
superbly controlled direction, The Five Senses has enough elements to keep your interest. Podeswa is no doubt a talent to watch, but he has some way to go before he engages with audiences on the same level as fellow compatriots Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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