Touch Me Not
Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not has good intentions, but what this chilly study of intimacy is lacking is, ironically, intimacy
Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not opens with a slow pan of a body, up a hairy limb to a flaccid penis and onwards. The opening shot sums up the jarring juxtaposition of Pintilie’s film: there’s confrontation yet, at the same time, a forced casualness.
A fictional documentary, Touch Me Not is an exploration of how bodies create intimacy. The film follows Laura (Benson), a middle-aged woman with intimacy issues. Unable to get close to anyone, she embarks on an odyssey of sexual healing, conducting interviews with people considered outside the sexual norm. There’s a touch therapist, a transgender sex worker, and a man with spinal muscular atrophy.
Touch Me Not’s provocative subject matter caused some raised eyebrows when it won 2018’s Berlinale, but for a film about intimacy, there’s nothing particularly shocking or radical happening. Interviews are conducted forensically, as if Pintilie is a scientist using Laura as her guinea pig. The film’s lack of warmth for its subjects is echoed stylistically with art-house blues-greys and coldly composed frames.
Pintilie’s film has nothing but good intentions – to hold up all sex as normal sex – but Touch Me Not’s coldness ironically blocks any intimacy between film and audience.
Released 19 Oct by MUBI; Certificate 18