TWO PEOPLE EXCHANGING SALIVA

If you are a lesbian, even if you are not, here is a film review for you:

Thanks to Octopus Moon, last night I watched Two People Exchanging Saliva: a French lesbian film by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh (though not a lesbian I don’t think). I watched it both on New Yorker Screening Room twopeopleexchangingsali…, which doesn’t give you a space to pour out your absurdly emotive, sapphically-charged feelings afterward, and on YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=RuO…, so I could read the comments like some modern-day group theater where I didn’t know a soul.

In its brief history with ties, seven, to be precise, and “not joking,” it co-won an Oscar win with The Singers. The film is exquisitely geometric and emotionally hyper-hallucinogenic. Two People Exchanging Saliva reminded me of Charlie Chaplin, of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) for its dystopian electronic musicality and Alpha 60ness, and of the severely constrained The Children’s Hour (1961), starring the iconic Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine.

Jodie Foster, yes, yes, yes, the lesbian icon who also happens to be fluent in French, cheerfully called it out in an Instagram interview with Luàna Bajrami (from Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Her verdict: "spectacularly beautiful… very stylish… unusually technique-driven for a short." Its black-and-white luscious geometry, its formality, its classic quality, all noted.

My own relationship to lesbian cinema is, for obvious reasons, a wary one. Lesbian films have a habit of leaving their characters—and me—(sexually and systematically) bruised. I consume sapphic materials with consistency but also with a defiant and helpless fear of the violent afterlife these films so often dictate. So I pre-gamed with reviews, performing the necessary emotional math to ensure I could emerge relatively unscathed.

What I found was tender and restrained (later, I hope to expand on the elegant tenderness between the two leads). Does lesbian desires have geometric shapes? What are the dominant shapes/impulses of sapphic desires? Characters with defiantly comedic names: Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), Pétulante (Aurélie Boquien), and Chagrin. The toothbrushing scene. The toothpaste as contraband. The long-corrugated cardboards marking the contours of coeval consumerism. Transformed into provocative, slapping, exciting material.

In the Era of Casual Casualities, under our absurd administration, amid our absurd war in Iran, it feels curiously right that something this casually genocidal, casually toothbrushy, this casually breath-checkery, should make its appearance.

#deathbytheconsumerismofakiss #deathbycardboardboxes #filmreview