“Two People Exchanging Saliva” Rewrites the Slap in Cinema

One of the promotional images for the movie “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is simply a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her look bruised, her chemoreceptor bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to marque of the feelings that this pistillate stirs successful us: the reflexive effect of distress, and past a much cultivated, and truthful repressed, curiosity? What could wounded truthful good? The movie is simply a fable astir intimacy and consumerism acceptable successful a dystopian mentation of Paris wherever romanticist touch, particularly the kiss, is forbidden, punishable by death. The national successful you laughs heartily arsenic this film, a tragicomedy, skewers the hypocrisies and ironies of the repressed West. But the person wrong besides aches: the directors, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, suspend america successful a authorities of tendency and longing, the thwarted kind.

Since 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the luxury section store successful Paris, has invited filmmakers to usage its interiors astatine night. Singh and Musteata, who are partners successful some enactment and life, exploit the aesthetic of the boutique, a terrible geometric glamour, for their Buñuel-esque communicative of bourgeois sadness. The movie is told successful chapters. The archetypal is called “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). A narrator, voiced by the Luxembourgian histrion Vicky Krieps, her dependable not godlike but alternatively melancholic and playful, introduces america to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naïf shopgirl with sparkling eyes, antagonistic to the meaning of her name. (Everyone successful this bleak satellite is named aft antithetic states of atrocious humor.) Malaise volition crook twenty-five soon. She is ill-fated, the narrator suggests. Malaise notices a customer, the beauteous Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, successful English, a notation to diseases of the heart—wandering soullessly done the section store, and she persuades the different pistillate to play a game.

The salesperson and her customer. The plain enactment of buying gives screen to the instant attraction. The clip to wage comes, and we person a shock. Malaise cautiously slips connected a bejewelled mitt and slaps Angine repeatedly. Currency successful a shadowy satellite that condemns intimacy arsenic carnal and grotesque—“two radical exchanging saliva” is different mode to picture kissing—is violence. To beryllium bruised is to beryllium among the precocious crust; Malaise’s co-workers feign status, extracurricular of work, with painted-on bruises. The brutality of conformism, the draining of romanticist love, the disavowal of quality eroticism and desire—these are the tenets of the nine that Singh and Musteata person drawn, with an impish humor, a nine that indispensable odor rank, fixed the interdiction against cleanable teeth.

But that slap. A punishment, a payment, a seduction, each astatine once. I could wax connected astir the allusive powerfulness of the film, its imaginable for mirroring our ain sick societies. But what astir interests maine successful this unnerving enactment is the slapping. Nothing successful cinema is purer than the face. The camera’s emotion of the look is the medium’s archetypal affair. And truthful the slap causes a ocular distortion, and a spiritual betrayal—the camera moving riot against its emotion object. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it akin to a kiss. Angine desperately returns to the store, again and again, to get her hole from Malaise, her look reddening from humor conscionable beneath the surface, a canvas of her awakened desire. She had sleepwalked done her genteel joined life, with a taciturn husband, called Chagrin, who is successful the concern of coffin-making—for each those unfortunate souls who could not unrecorded without the kiss.