“Two Folks Exchanging Saliva” Rewrites the Slap in Cinema

One of many promotional photos for the movie “Two Folks Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a lady, her face bruised, her nostril bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to make of the emotions that this girl stirs in us: the reflexive response of misery, after which a extra cultivated, and subsequently repressed, curiosity? What might harm so good? The movie is a fable about intimacy and consumerism set in a dystopian model of Paris the place romantic contact, particularly the kiss, is forbidden, punishable by loss of life. The citizen in you laughs heartily as this movie, a tragicomedy, skewers the hypocrisies and ironies of the repressed West. However the lover inside additionally aches: the administrators, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, droop us in a state of need and longing, the thwarted sort.

Since 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the posh division retailer in Paris, has invited filmmakers to make use of its interiors at evening. Singh and Musteata, who’re companions in each work and life, exploit the aesthetic of the boutique, a extreme geometric glamour, for his or her Buñuel-esque story of bourgeois unhappiness. The movie is instructed in chapters. The primary is named “Le Jeu” (“The Recreation”). A narrator, voiced by the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, her voice not godlike however as an alternative melancholic and playful, introduces us to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naïf shopgirl with glowing eyes, counter to the that means of her title. (Everybody on this bleak world is called after completely different states of unhealthy humor.) Malaise will flip twenty-five quickly. She is ill-fated, the narrator suggests. Malaise notices a buyer, the gorgeous Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, in English, a reference to illnesses of the guts—wandering soullessly by means of the division retailer, and she or he persuades the opposite girl to play a sport.

The salesperson and her buyer. The plain act of buying provides cowl to the moment attraction. The time to pay comes, and we obtain a shock. Malaise rigorously slips on a bejewelled glove and slaps Angine repeatedly. Foreign money in a shadowy world that condemns intimacy as animal and grotesque—“two individuals exchanging saliva” is one other method to describe kissing—is violence. To be bruised is to be among the many higher crust; Malaise’s co-workers feign standing, outdoors of labor, with painted-on bruises. The brutality of conformism, the draining of romantic love, the disavowal of human eroticism and need—these are the tenets of the society that Singh and Musteata have drawn, with an impish humor, a society that should scent rank, given the interdiction in opposition to clear enamel.

However that slap. A punishment, a fee, a seduction, all of sudden. I might wax on concerning the allusive energy of the movie, its potential for mirroring our personal sick societies. However what most pursuits me on this unnerving work is the slapping. Nothing in cinema is purer than the face. The digicam’s love of the face is the medium’s authentic affair. And so the slap causes a visible distortion, and a non secular betrayal—the digicam working riot in opposition to its love object. “Two Folks Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it akin to a kiss. Angine desperately returns to the shop, repeatedly, to get her repair from Malaise, her face reddening from blood slightly below the floor, a canvas of her woke up need. She had sleepwalked by means of her genteel married life, with a taciturn husband, known as Chagrin, who’s within the enterprise of coffin-making—for all these unlucky souls who couldn’t dwell with out the kiss.