Brexit. Trump. And now the Berlin film festival jury’s Golden Bear announcement. Truly, we are living through an age of catastrophe. To the impolite astonishment of many, this year’s Golden Bear has gone to Touch Me Not, by the Romanian director Adina Pintilie.
This is a quasi-fictional documentary essay about sexuality, which deluged me in a tidal wave of depression at how embarrassingly awful it was, at its mediocrity, its humourless self-regard, its fatuous and shallow approach to its ostensible theme of intimacy, and the clumsy way all this was sneakily elided with Euro-hardcore cliches about BDSM, alternative sexualities, fetishism and exhibitionism.
And yet Touch Me Not certainly had its admirers: I had a conversation with a distinguished Italian festival programmer here who considered it the best thing around. I personally think that the calamitous elevation of Touch Me Not, at the expense of better films, is a very Berlin experience. It is often an exasperatingly featureless festival that has terrific films hidden in its programme, films which are there to be discovered, by and large not in its official competition. It is a festival that somehow manages to promote the dullest and most valueless films in its lineup, leaving the good stuff to be revealed almost by accident.
Touch Me Not is ostensibly about the emotional journeys of various personae, perhaps developed through improvisation and dramatically reconstructed scenes with the real people involved. Laura Benson plays Laura, a woman with issues around anger and voyeurism, evidently connected with her father, although these root causes are not explored in any valuable way. Christian, played by Christian Bayerlein, is a man with spinal muscular atrophy who is interested in challenging ideas about body image. Tómas Lemarquis is Tudor, who is also investigating similar personal themes. Laura appears to be in conversation with the director, who appears as herself.
The director initially contrives a quasi-clinical therapeutic discussion encounter group in a hospital setting where everyone is wearing rather quaint white outfits for their discussions – white T-shirts, white trousers, is this a uniform? Laura herself has various meetings with people who may or may not unlock her traumas, although these are not analysed or discussed in any very intelligent or very helpful way, despite the fact that Laura, like Christian and Tudor, is herself very intelligent. We are heading only one way: towards the sex club. Honesty, openness, intimacy, emotional literacy – it is all conflated with the sex club, a place about which the director is very naïve. There is no reason to think that the sex club is a place where there is any less evasion and emotional imposture than hanging out at Starbucks. As for Laura, her sexuality and sexual issues are the least interesting thing about her: she sounds smart, incisive, interesting. If only she was allowed to talk, really talk, about her life and ideas.
I cannot blame the jury. I myself have been on international film festival juries that have arrived at eccentric decisions. There’s something about being closeted with people you’ve only just met that triggers weird ideas, strange spasms of consensus. On another point, I myself have been infuriated with the dishonesty of people who affect to think of challengingly sexual films as “boring” when clearly they haven’t been bored – and I should say that that boredom was not exactly my problem with Touch Me Not.
Furthermore, I have had, in my time, people literally shouting in my face because I have praised difficult or challenging films like Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité, or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, or Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Part of me wishes Adine Pintilie well with her film — but its sheer embarrassing silliness and self-congratulation was very depressing.