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WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
CULT URE No.36 JUNE 12, 2018 7
By Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day
The drama Touch Me Not (Nu Ma Atinge-
Ma, Romania – Germany – Czech Republic
– Bulgaria – France, 2018) became a
real sensation of the last Berlinale,
winning there both the Golden Bear
for the best feature film and the award for the
best debut.
This work, done as a peculiar combination of
live-action and documentary cinema, tells the
story of three heroes – Laura, Tudor, and Christian.
The first two are played by well-known actors
Laura Benson (Dangerous Liaisons (1988),
Ready to Wear (1994)) and Tomas Lemarquis
(3 Days to Kill (2014), X Men: Apocalypse
(2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)). Like many
supporting characters, they share the same problem
as they strive and at the same time acutely
fear intimacy, corporeal and emotional alike.
Christian practically plays himself: crippled by
spinal muscular atrophy, he is completely free
from prejudice and lives with the girl he loves.
The film itself is a kind of story about liberation,
about overcoming of protective mechanisms and
taboos, sometimes in quite unusual ways.
In the non-competitive program of the
Molodist Festival, which ended in Kyiv on
June 3, Touch Me Not was personally presented
by the film’s director Adina Pintilie and the
leading actress Laura Benson.
Adina-Elena Pintilie was born in Bucharest
on January 12, 1980. She debuted in 2003 as a
documentary filmmaker. Her non-live-action
works participated in the competition programs
of the festivals in Locarno, Rotterdam, Leipzig,
and Warsaw. Pintilie serves as artistic director
and curator of the International Experimental
Film Festival in Bucharest. Touch Me Not is her
first live-action film.
After the Kyiv premiere, Pintilie answered
questions of The Day’s correspondent.
How did it occur to you to make Touch Me
Not?
“When I was twenty, I thought I knew everything
about how relationship should function,
intimacy, our desire mechanism, and also what
means beauty. But in the past years of life, I realized
that actually I don’t know anything. Once
clear ideas get destabilized when I enter in contact
with real people and with real life. So, we set
out on this journey to just question our own preconceived
ideas about how intimacy functions,
and to discover how people actually can access
intimacy in the most unexpected ways. And back
in 2013, we started an extensive casting process,
which was more like in documentaries, but this
film is not a documentary. We try to avoid all
these labels, because the film is mainly a research
one, it is a process film, a research film.
“So, in 2013 we started this extending casting
period. It was not like looking for actors, it
was more like looking for like-minded people.
And after finding them, we worked with video
diaries, with a lot of filmed exercises – it was before
the official shooting, where we could get accustomed
with the camera being, like, a witness
of some of our very personal, intimate stories.
So, this kind of a long process helped to grow the
trust between the participants in the project.”
It looks like creating a commune of sorts.
“It was like fiction functioning like more a
sort of laboratory, like a safe place which allowed
us to explore really sensitive areas. Because
when you are protecting yourself under, let’s
say, fictional character, in that convention you
can go everywhere, because you don’t need to
know what is real, what is invented, what is
imagined, what is memory. Many of them came
as themselves in the film. So, they were not playing
with this mixture of fictional and real elements,
they brought their own.”
Did you have the help of professional psychologists?
“Yes. For example, the emotional anatomy
workshop: it’s designed by this very distinguished
German performance artist and therapist
Julia Sparmann. I found this very inspiring.
So I proposed to collaborate and to create a workshop
for the film, and within this structure,
reenactment of the real workshop, we cast real
people that wanted to work with this intimacy
area in front of the camera, to share their experiences.
And they were already entering this, I
would call it, conventional laboratory. And
everything that happens in this created structure,
or a lot of what is happening there, it’s really
authentic encounters between people. So,
this is a very good example of how the mixture
between staging and reality functions.”
THE DRAMA TOUCH ME NOT BECAME A REAL SENSATION OF THE LAST BERLINALE
REUTERS photo
“We set out on this journey to just
questionourownpreconceivedideas”
Can your directorial approach be called anthropological?
“I would not call it, because anthropologizing
claims sort of objectivity. But this film is a very
subjective emotional exploration that each of us
went through. And by being highly subjective, I
don’t think you can call it a scientific approach.
I mean, in the end, if you look at psychotherapy,
it is both sort of science, but it also involves high
doses of subjectivity, intuition, and non-rational
thinking, because they work a lot with the unconscious
mind, with early memories, with a lot
of emotions. So, that’s why I’m hesitating to put
it in the area of science, but I would put it in the
area of research. Research about human nature,
in that sense it is connected to anthropology.”
One of the protagonists is played by an actor
with a disability. What was special about
working with such an actor?
The Golden Bear winner of the Berlin Film
Festival Adina Pintilie discusses the intimacy
and phenomenon of the Romanian cinema
“For me it was very important in the casting
process. And when trying to find these people,
it was very important to feel that they have
a strong motivation, emotional motivation to be
part of the project. And Christian, it’s a very
particular example of this, because he wanted
to communicate with the audience. And actually,
I think this film functioned like sort of a dialog,
like many of the characters have their
own, very specific views of the world, very progressive,
and they would like to share it with
the audience. And Christian said it from the beginning:
‘I’m not afraid that this film is going
to be attacked for me, for doing it. Because you
know, the people who are going to attack the
film are people who just actually have no idea
about disability and about the relationship between
disability and intimacy. They think that
we, people who have different label on body, we
just need to be taken care of, we are asexual, we
don’t have any intimate life.’ And for him it
was very important to enter into this communication
with the audience and to share with them
that people with the different label on bodies
have the same desire, the same needs, and the
same right to exist as sexual beings as any other
person. He is also an activist for the rights of
people with disabilities. And it was really an inspiring
experience for all of us in the film to
have Christian and Grit. They are a real couple,
they are really passionate explorers of intimacy.
Earlier only Christian was able to verbalize,
to speak about this, but now Grit started to explain,
and her voice is growing in this whole
thing.”
Do you see a difference between documentary
and live-action cinema?
“The border between the two is actually so
fluid, because in the end, it’s about cinema,
which is a very subjective experience of reality.
It’s an illusion that you can capture the reality
in a sort of an objective way. You cannot do
something like that from the moment you choose
to put the camera and to make a frame, and
everything becomes a matter of subjective perception.
I had the privilege to witness a master
class that Werner Herzog [a German screenwriter,
film director, author, actor, and opera
director. – Author] gave some years ago in Salonica,
and he was criticizing, debating with this
view of documentary as being sort of fly-on-thewall
approach, where you don’t interfere, you
don’t alter reality. And he was saying, ‘I don’t
want to be a fly on the wall, I want to be the bee
that stings.’ Because you can’t have access to the
truth of the human being by just putting the
camera and watching that thing, that is happening
in front of you. I have to be able to create situation,
to provoke, to create the environment
that can bring that truth to the surface. So, the
reality is not what it is, it’s transformed by the
subjective perception. And in that sense, I really
don’t think there’s a distinction.”
Now, when there are many different kinds
of technologies that let one change one’s body,
what do you think, how has the attitude to corporeality
changed?
“I basically can talk about my very subjective
experience. I notice that in the past years
at least, there is a strong interest for these selfexploration
activities, like for workshops in
different areas. And I think this happens everywhere
in the world. Everywhere I traveled,
there is growing interest in this process of getting
to know your own body, and to be friends
and accepting your body as it is. But luckily,
more and more people start to look at that as
something very normal, as something which is
naturally part of your life and is worth exploring,
because it helps you. If you know yourself
better, you can solve also the other stuff. Actually,
psychoanalysts have for a hundred years
talked about how intimacy and sexuality are
such natural parts of your life and your development.
This all is so natural in psychotherapy,
but for many other areas of discussion in our
life, this is a difficult topic to approach. Psychoanalyst
Michael Bader was explaining that
your sexual behavior and your sexual fantasy
can be key to read aspects of yourself also in
other domains. So, you can judge yourself and
say, ‘I’m wrong, I’m sick, I have to go to hospital
to repair myself’ – or you can look with honesty
at yourself and you say, ‘OK, I am like this,
let’s try to understand what’s behind this behavior,
why I am actually doing that.” There
are ways of experiencing intimacy different
from the norm, if you try to understand them
and not put a label that they are wrong, first of
all, you will have a better understanding of
yourself, and then you will have a different relationship
with the other person in front of you.
So, you will not so easy become an extremist, or
judgmental, or right-wing, the degree of aggressiveness
has high chances to decrease.
That’s why a film like this is important, because
it’s offering a sort of mirror about how
people can be different than what you think
they are, how you think they should be.”
In conclusion, a question asked from our
Ukrainian perspective this time. It can be said
that we here in Ukraine envy you, Romanian
filmmakers, greatly, because you have just
suddenly, after a prolonged period of communism
and troubles, created an incredibly flourishing
cinematic school. How have you managed
to do it?
“I don’t know. “I don’t know. I mean, the
Romanian cinematic community was all the
time clashing with political system, with the
state system. So, you have this situation which
is not so nice and cozy, it’s not so comfortable,
so then you need to put extra energy to make
things happen. Maybe this is energy which
comes from having an enemy, having an antagonist.
There are a lot of talented people, but not
all of them functioning.”