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A promotional image for the picture “Two People Exchanging Saliva” presents a black-and-white close-up of a lady, her face marked, her nose bleeding, her eyes heavy with rapture. How should we consider the sensations this woman sparks within us: the automatic feeling of anguish, succeeded by a more refined, and thus suppressed, inquisitiveness? What could be so deliciously painful? The movie is a parable concerning closeness and materialism occurring in a grim depiction of Paris where amorous contact, specifically the peck, is prohibited, punishable by demise. The citizen inside you chortles heartily as this film, a tragic farce, ridicules the double standards and paradoxes of the confined West. But the romantic at heart also suffers: the creators, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, hold us suspended in a condition of craving and pining, the unfulfilled variety.
Commencing in 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the high-end emporium in Paris, has welcomed movie makers to utilize its interior at night. Singh and Musteata, who share life and labor, harness the allure of the retail establishment, a stern geometric elegance, for their Buñuel-inspired tale of upper-class sorrow. The film is presented through segments. The initial one is named “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). A raconteur, voiced by the Luxembourgian performer Vicky Krieps, her vocal tone not divine yet rather melancholic and jovial, familiarizes us with Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), an unsuspecting store clerk with radiant eyes, contrary to the significance of her appellation. (Everyone in this desolate realm is designated following varying conditions of displeasure.) Malaise will be twenty-five before long. She is star-crossed, the speaker insinuates. Malaise notices a patron, the attractive Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, concerning ailments of the ticker—wandering desolately within the retail building, and she convinces the other woman to partake in a pastime.
The vendor and her shopper. The regular undertaking of buying offers disguise for the instantaneous magnetism. The instant for payment arrives, and we endure a jolt. Malaise carefully dons an ornate glove and smacks Angine repeatedly. Legal tender in a cryptic world that condemns intimacy as animalistic and disgusting—“two individuals swapping saliva” is just another manner of portraying kissing—is brutality. To bear contusions is to belong to the elite; Malaise’s workmates mimic position, following hours, with painted-on markings. The cruelty of compliance, the emptying of passionate affection, the negation of human eroticism and yearning—these comprise the principles of the community that Singh and Musteata have conceived, with a mischievous wit, a community that must reek, given the prohibition against unsoiled teeth.
Yet that swat. A discipline, a reimbursement, a draw, concurrently. I might elaborate on the suggestive force of the film, its capacity for mirroring our own unhealthy societies. Nevertheless, what seizes my attention most in this disturbing creation is the striking. Nothing in filmmaking is more unadulterated than the visage. The camera’s fixation on the face signifies the medium’s primary romance. Consequently, the swat engenders a visual deformity, plus a spiritual treachery—the camera running amok against its beloved object. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” reimagines the swat, rendering it analogous to a peck. Angine urgently returns to the store, incessantly, to acquire her dose from Malaise, her face reddening from fluid just beneath the layer, a tableau of her awakened longing. She had sleepwalked through her dignified marital existence, with a taciturn spouse, dubbed Chagrin, who engages in the profession of coffin creation—for all those tragic beings who could not subsist without the peck.
Sourse: newyorker.com
