Perfect Sense an Under-appreciated Film

Be among the tens who have seen this film! 

PERFECT SENSE (2011)

Directed by David MacKenzie

Scottish Screen, 92 mins. R (full frontal nudity and sensuality)

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Perfect Sense was a hit at Sundance and nowhere else; it bombed at the box office in both the United States and Britain, where it was released. Too bad, because it’s a very well acted and provocative film, despite several shortcomings.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Perfect Sense is ultimately a depressing film. It’s a science fiction romance set in the near future, one in which Armageddon unfolds slowly and mysteriously. Across the globe people experience sudden, violent temper tantrums and then lose their sense of smell. As in all such films, the scientific community is baffled by what it labels S.O.S. (Severe Olfactory Syndrome). Susan (the scrumptious and sexy Eva Green) is a Glasgow epidemiologist, one of many who are clueless about what causes S.O.S. Just outside of her apartment, Michael (the hunky Ewan McGregor) has a different dilemma; he’s the head chef of an upscale restaurant and he, his boss (Denis Lawson), and his food artist assistant James (Ewen Bremmer) worry about the financial future of a business in which aromas matter almost as much as how the food feels in the mouth. Michael, as it turns out, is a man of other hearty appetites; he’s a serial womanizer as well as a master chef.

One can, of course, predict that he and Susan will become an item, but this is not your conventional good-girl-tames-rogue picture. The two will be thrown together as much by a desire to retain a balance between passion and normality as by animal magnetism. As it turns out, loss of smell is just the outside leaf of the apocalyptic iceberg lettuce. It’s followed by mass outbreaks of sheer terror, followed by insatiable hunger, then loss of taste. So what does one do in a world without smell or taste? What do humans generally do in the face of tragedy? They seek routine and pattern. Thus Michael continues to consult his recipes, and James lovingly crafts each plate that leaves the kitchen, though neither cooks nor patrons can do other than feel the food and drink upon their tongues.  By this time, though, Susan and Michael have quite a lot of tongue action of their own on their private menus.

If only loss of smell and taste were the end of the bad news! But, of course, it isn’t. Waves of worldwide sadness bring deafness; momentary eruptions of bliss give way to blindness. All that is left is touch, which we presume to be the “perfect sense,” though one can’t hold out a lot of hope for a planet filled with humans who have no way of communicating, let alone farming, hunting, or foraging. I presume we’re supposed to muse upon how the world we live in overloads our other senses to the degree that we’re both figuratively and literally “out of touch” with one another, though I give director David MacKenzie credit for not moralizing, sorting out, or gift-wrapping an ending for us. I would yield to anyone who said the film is manipulative, but one can’t escape musing upon how the world would cope with catastrophic loss, or what one would cling to if all else was lost.

Green and McGregor are both terrific, and there’s real frisson and electricity between them. Okay, so you watch this film and wobble away off your stride because it’s unlikely that anyone lives for very much longer, let alone happily ever after. Still, you’ll be thinking about what you’ve seen and what it made you feel for days afterward, which is quite a bit more than can be said for 99% of the goes-down-easy pabulum we’re fed these days. My only beef is with critics that have heaped praise upon Danish writer Kim Fupz Aakeson, who blatantly expanded upon the central premise of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Blindness (1995). I kept waiting for some acknowledgement of inspiration, but none was forthcoming. As I warn students, changing a few details but pirating another’s major idea is plagiarism unless you give credit. So a thumb’s up for the film, but a raspberry to Aakeson.--Rob Weir

Maine a Page-Turner That Blows the Sheen Off Bourgeois Life

MAINE (2011)

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Knopf 978-030759126

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There are two types of fiction writers, those who extrapolate from real-life experience, and those who reside entirely in their imaginations. For her sake, I hope that J. Courtney Sullivan is from the second school because if her family is anything at all like the Kelleher clan at the heart of her newest novel, Maine, she will spend every royalty nickel she makes on therapy. To call the Kellehers dysfunctional is akin to calling Rush Limbaugh insensitive—correct, but light years short of ultimate truth. It gives away nothing to say that among the book’s pleasures is its devastating critique of blind faith and bourgeois ethics.

I picked up this book because I was headed to Maine for a vacation and know well the Cape Neddick/Ogunquit region where much of the book is set. It is a beautiful area, the perfect backdrop for hell masquerading as heaven. Sullivan’s sprawling novel spans four generations of a Boston Irish Catholic family. That’s a lot of time and, initially, the sheer number of characters seems daunting, but it eventually centers on four women: 83-year-old family matriarch, Alice; her eldest daughter Kathleen; Kathleen’s daughter, Maggie; and Alice’s (overly) dutiful daughter-in-law Ann Marie. Everything revolves around Alice, a self-absorbed, vain (and still striking) woman who wears her piety like a too-revealing summer dress. She is a complex character, but also so thoroughly calculating that hardly a page goes by in which you don’t wish you could personally strangle the old bat (even after her dark secret is revealed). But she has plenty of obnoxious competition--the Kellehers are a collection of substance abusers, recovering addicts, ne’er do wells, liars, egoists, social climbers, dreamers, and other malcontents.  When he lived, Alice’s husband, Daniel, kept the lid on the poison jar; now that he's gone, not even the cold Maine waters can absorb Kelleher toxicity. The central role of the Catholic Church notwithstanding, Daniel is the only thing resembling a saint in this novel.

Right after World War II, Daniel he won a bet in which the payoff was a hunk of oceanside real estate along what was then an undeveloped slice of southern Maine coastline. Now the unpretentious cottage he built and where Alice holds court is reachable only through the clamor of Route 1 and even that oasis stands cheek-by-jowl with a Yuppie McMansion thrown up by their lawyer son Patrick and his obsequious wife Ann Marie. Ann Marie grew up working-class disrespectful—think gangsters without money. The family beach house is part of her relentless drive to live in a happy bubble, as is her refusal to see that her own son is the white-collar analog to her thug/brother, her fruitless currying of Alice’s favor, and her obsessive building of fantasy dollhouses that are like the beach house but without the Kellehers. (Well, that’s a start!) We soon get the point that the only way to stay sane is to stay as far removed from Alice as possible. Middle daughter Clare manages this, but not the eldest, Kathleen, though lord knows she’s tried. She divorced her philandering husband decades earlier, but that’s a mortal sin in the eyes of Alice, partly because of her putative faith and partly because Alice is partial to any slime ball who flatters her. Kathleen got drunk, got sober, met a Baby Boomer dreamer named Arlo, and moved to California to take up yoga and organic worm farming. (Yep!) Unfortunately, her own daughter, Maggie, forces her to end her self-imposed exile when she shows up at the beach with a muffin in the oven, but without her pathetic boyfriend, Gabe (whom Alice thought was wonderful).  Predictably, Kathleen rushes off to Maine to confront Maggie and, just as predictably, family sparks fly. (Maggie is a character over whom debates will rage. For the record, I found her as cloying as Gen Xers can be when they seek to shift the blame for all their troubles to anyone in the world except themselves.)

As a family drama, Maine is first rate. Sullivan has a great ear for dialogue and she also has a gift for observing small details that make ordinary things seem extraordinary. The novel is certainly open to the charge of being cluttered, as if Sullivan became so enamored of things she’s contemplated that she felt the need to force fit them into the plot. You will find echoes of the Catholic Church sex scandals, the Bulger family, Boston politics, and the devastating 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in which 492 people died. (And one suspects she’s eliding the 2003 Warwick, Rhode Island fire with some of that.) The book also feels claustrophobic when it moves to Boston or New York, as if it needs the Maine air to breathe. Okay, sure, but this is still a crisp novel, a proverbial page-turner that’s filled with memorable characters, skin-squirming situations, and quotable lines. It topped my summer reading list, but this Smith College graduate’s second novel makes for compelling reading in any season.

Footnote: I was mightily amused to read some of the comments left on Good Reads. Quite a few people hated the book because they didn’t “like” some of the characters. Duh! That’s the whole damn point. Sullivan hit the self-absorbed middle class with a right hook and Irish Catholicism with a left cross. If you don’t get that, maybe you should build dollhouses!