Touch Me Not (2018)

Directed by: Adina Pintilie | 123 minutes | drama | Actors: Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann, Adina Pintilie, Hanna Hofmann, Seani Love, Irmena Chichikova, Rainer Steffen, Georgi Naldzhiev, Dirk Lange, Annett Sawallisch

One festival winner is not the other. Where Cannes chose the always reliable Hirokazu Kore-Eda in 2018, the Berlinale 2018 surprised with the idiosyncratic Romanian entry ‘Touch Me Not’. A film that begins with the exploration of a frontally naked male body and ends with a dancing naked woman. With a lot more naked in between.

‘Touch Me Not’ revolves around Laura, who is introverted in her fifties, a woman whose emotional inhibitions lead to a physical aversion to touch and intimacy. There is quite a lot of anger stored in her body, a anger that comes from a traumatized childhood. We also meet Tomas, a completely bald man who used to be bullied at school after which he also hid his emotions behind a high mental wall. Opposite these two inhibited people is Christian, a physically disfigured twenty-something who has fully accepted himself and his disability and is therefore not afraid of intimacy. In ‘Touch Me Not’ we mainly follow Tomas and Laura, each on their way to sexual and emotional liberation.

With ‘Touch Me Not’ we enter the little-known world of body-oriented psychotherapy and sex therapy. Laura books gigolos, sex therapists and even a transsexual prostitute, in an effort to get rid of her blocks. Tomas follows a kind of touch therapy, in which he becomes Christian’s therapeutic partner.

It produces interesting but somewhat raw food, and therein lies the problem. The content is about deep, raw emotions, but in form and style ‘Touch Me Not’ is as distant and untouchable as the main characters themselves. In form it is a semi-documentary drama, in which director Adina Pintilie sometimes interferes in the picture and we also see the camera crew at work. There are also alienating sounds and alienating images, sometimes shrill and dead, sometimes lively and colorful. Of course this changing style serves a higher purpose, but the self-conscious and artificial means that the film is rarely emotional.

As long as the content is captivating, that cold style is still manageable. But in some longer scenes, such as the one with the already annoying transsexual, the style does work against the film. It means that this fierce liberation drama could have been a lot better than it has become now. A film that is suitable for people who can appreciate a comparable film as ‘Shortbus’ (but without humor). Like the brave jury of Berlin 2018.