In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Writer and director Jeremy Podeswa undertakes a difficult task here – intertwining the stories of five main characters, each struggling with one of their five senses.
Rona (Mary-Louise Parker) is a professional cake decorator, but she has no sense of taste – plus her Italian holiday fling is arriving on a plane to take over her life and kitchen. Her best friend Robert (Daniel MacIvor) is a housecleaner with an unusually keen sense of smell – he believes he can smell love and decides to sniff it out amongst his former partners – while ophthalmologist Robert loves opera but is losing his sense of hearing.
Their stories play out around the key drama: massage therapist Ruth (Gabrielle Rose) is treating Anna (Molly Parker) and sends her teenage daughter Rachel to the park to distract Anna’s toddler. Rachel manages to both lose the toddler and meet a voyeuristic teenage boy at the same time, setting up the central dramatic premise for the film – will the toddler be found?
Podeswa weaves the characters’ stories between and around this plot line, as they go through their own journeys of personal and sexual discovery. Sounds complicated – and it is – but Podeswa keeps it neatly balanced between the affecting emotion and excellent performances of Molly Parker as the distraught toddler’s mother and Gabrielle Rose as the guilty massage therapist, and the lighter banter between baker Rona and her BFF Robert.
Mary Louise Parker gets all the best lines and delivers them with her trademark bemused panache (“Of course I look well, all I do is fuck and eat”) and if, as Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk posits (tongue perhaps in cheek), Canadian cinema is all Weird Sex and Snowshoes, then The Five Senses firmly delivers on the former. There’s parkland cruising, cross-dressing, a threesome, a cultured Québécois prostitute - all the interesting ‘adult themes’ that set Canadian dramas apart from their more puritan cousins south of the border.
In the end, though, neither the central premise of the characters as metaphors for the five senses, nor the fact that the stories interlink, becomes important. Rather, The Five Senses is an empathetic study of nine interesting individuals as they struggle with personal problems both common and life-changing.
- Nick Jarvis
“A story like "Five Senses" sounds like a gimmick, but Podeswa has a light touch when dealing with the senses and a sure one when telling his stories." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.