Corporeal Legibility in the Age of Coronavirus—Adina Pintilie's Touch Me Not
Touch Me Not, Adina Pintilie (2019)
"A little bit more, or less distance?" Two women sit on a couch—Laura, a British woman in her fifties, and Hanna, who she met online. "I don't want you to get too close," Laura answers. Hanna's knees are a fair distance from Laura's. "Is it too close for you?" Hanna inquires. "A bit."
Boundaries between bodies comprise the central preoccupation of Adina Pintilie's Touch Me Not, a hybrid work that itself dwells in uneasy spaces between documentary and fiction. Here, several individuals endeavor to articulate their fears of being touched. Touch alternately represents a means of contact, trust, and danger—the individuals in question hold and turn the feeling around, approaching it from different angles. Positing touch as a vehicle for corporeal and emotional legibility, the film unsettles our epistemologies of intimacy and desire, foregrounding experiences of distance, rejection, withdrawal.
Touch Me Not, Adina Pintilie (2019)
While Laura's acquaintances are quick to opine on the psychology of her aversion to touch, she doesn't find her story particularly interesting—at least, she doesn't believe her story is what got her here. At an observational remove, we accompany Laura in a series of encounters with male prostitutes, therapists, and transgender call girls; from time to time she ventures to a hospital, visiting a man we assume to be her father. The man is feeble, frail; Laura hardly speaks with him. In these spaces sound gains primacy—the faint beeping of a pulse monitor, muffled footsteps—while the camera's lens rests on rumpled bedsheets. In the hospital room Laura is consigned to a blurred background, as she is during the film's opening sequence, in which she watches a tattooed man shower then masturbate on her bed. Laura does not partake, but remains at a distance, out of focus, until he leaves.
Wandering through the hospital one day, Laura notices another man. Tómas is a frequent visitor, attending group touch-therapy sessions in an airy, cavernous room with participants all clad in white. We learn that Tómas was diagnosed with alopecia and lost his hair around the time he was thirteen—once a 'cute, blonde boy,' he became something else entirely, someone 'different.' Compelled by an unspoken attraction, Laura begins following him. Only then does she notice another woman, and realize that he is following her.
Touch Me Not, Adina Pintilie (2019)
The cold, sterile spaces of hospital corridors and empty waiting rooms blend with desaturated bedroom images—blue hues render flesh cold, conjuring our desire for warmth. In a particularly unnerving sequence, the camera hovers over the torso of Tómas, his blue eyes gazing upward. "I can feel your heart," remarks a female voice, unseen. The camera pushes into close-up, panning langorously from Tómas' chest to his abdomen, lingering upon images of his skin. The camera moves back laterally, retracing its journey, to reveal a nipple, a face. The face looks different. It is a woman now.
Where does one body end, and another begin? With clear vision denied us, small details reverberate in the diegetic soundscape. Temporal dilation heightens our awareness of the corporeal—uneven surfaces, marks and imperfections—as disembodied voices continue offscreen. This indiscernibility between bodies, the fluid transition from one to another, dissolves the notion of any boundary one could hope to achieve. Suspended in a state of magnified perceptivity, we form an acute awareness of our mutual exposure.
Premiering at the 68th Berlinale, Touch Me Not was not only a surprising contender in the Competition line-up, but a contested choice for the festival's top prize—a decision one prominent critic deemed "a calamity." Adina Pintilie's first film is certainly unconventional, cerebral, and unapologetically provocative; Touch Me Not spares no detail in its portrayal of the differently-abled or the vicissitudes of emotional trauma, and features several explicit sex scenes, including at an underground BDSM club. But there is more at stake in Touch Me Not, one might argue, than the legibility of bodies that have been consistently occluded from discourses of desire, important though this may be. Significantly, the film actively encourages new forms of attention with our bodies as such.
As the novel coronavirus contines its chain of transmission across continents, cultures and borders, it shows little regard for human constructions—our so-called 'boundaries.' The pandemic calls into stark relief an understanding of our own vulnerability, the fallibility of physical bodies. And yet, headlines endlessly trumpet the number of fatalities as if human life were an abstraction, a metric to be quantified and tracked by analysts. A macabre media fixation on 'death counts' conceptualizes dying as a phenomenon not of bodies, but of data points.
"I live with my body every day," Laura remarks after her encounter with the tattooed man. "But I suppose I don't really know it." On the other side of the camera the filmmaker offers an adjustment: "in my perception, you are your body." Through her unrelenting gaze, Adina Pintilie's Touch Me Not advances a tool unexpectedly appropriate to the moment—touch as a reminder, a mode of relation to our imperfect, precarious, corporeal selves.
Touch Me Not, Adina Pintilie (2019)