The Five Senses

Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa has delivered an artful mosaic of slightly overlapping stories, all of which touch upon the challenges of creating and sustaining meaningful relationships. Employing the five senses - feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling - as a framework for his narrative, Podeswa establishes an interesting relationship between personal needs and sensual desires, linking fundamental intuition - what one can sense - with the more complicated nuances of achieving closeness and avoiding alienation.

The film chronicles three pivotal days in the lives of five tenuously related individuals, all of whom either live or work in the same building. There is Ruth (Gabrielle Rose), a widowed massage therapist struggling to understand her fraying relationship with her daughter; Ruth's daughter Rachel (Nadia Litz), a troubled teenager with a dark and sexual fascination with voyeurism; Robert (Daniel MacIvor), a sardonic house cleaner with a romantic eye for both sexes, though little luck with either; Rona (Mary-Louise Parker), a wry cake decorator who mistrusts the affections of her newly immigrated Italian lover; and Richard (Philippe Volter), a quietly dignified French eye doctor who is trying to keep the horrors of total deafness at bay. The wheels of this drama are set in motion by the sudden disappearance of a young girl, a misfortune that offers both a powerful catalyst and a harrowing backdrop to the personal struggles of our five main subjects.

By having each character symbolize one of the five senses - the masseuse's touch, the voyeur's sight, the cleaner's smell, the baker's taste, the doctor's sound - Podeswa magnifies the way sensations mediate relations between people, and inform our experience of the world. While at times this theme feels heavy-handed - most evident in Robert's wish to "smell love" - the film's sophistication keeps its emphasis on the senses from feeling too gimmicky. There is a reality to this ensemble of characters that goes beyond their concept-driven frameworks. Adopting a style and visual texture that clearly echoes fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan (no doubt a product of producer Camelia Frieberg's long-standing association with the award-winning director), Podeswa cuts from scene to scene with a cool confidence, and is remarkably adept at orchestrating an ensemble of fleshed-out characters.

It is refreshing to come across a film that does not wallow obsessively in the human tragedies of its own making. Podeswa does not fetishize poor luck or become preoccupied with particular circumstances. A cute little girl is gone from a park, but we are not subjected to two hours of hand wringing over her plight. Rather, he is interested in the ways particular situations affect and inspire human behavior - and in the vulnerabilities inherent in establishing human relationships. As a result, he offers a film that confronts difficult realities with the same calm dexterity action directors use when dealing with chase scenes: These things just happen.

The film's biggest misstep is its title. Given that a sensual awareness pervades the work, there is something almost pedantic about calling it The Five Senses. It might have been a little more interesting if the theme took a little longer to rise to the surface. This immediate spotlight feels unnecessary - it underestimates the way the senses successfully resonate throughout the film

Bourja Saeed Islam Online, Washington