THE FIVE SENSES

Putting too many characters in a movie, especially if it’s a drama, can be disconcerting for the audience. Just when the audience gets involved with one story, the movie throws in another story to confuse them. THE FIVE SENSES finds a unique way around this potential problem: the drama and the characters focus on the five senses – touch, taste, hearing, smell, and vision.

The movie explores how the five senses can affect people’s lives. It is about several people who live and work in the same building in Toronto, Canada. One of them is a massage therapist who’s out of touch with her daughter, Rachel, who likes to watch other people rather than interact with them. Another character, an optometrist, is becoming deaf and is afraid that, when he loses his hearing, his world will become smaller. Also in the building, a woman cake baker named Rona is better at decorating her cakes than baking them. Her lack of taste is challenged when her boyfriend from Italy, a talented chef, unexpectedly comes to visit her with love on his mind. The baker’s bisexual male friend, however, is suspicious of the loquacious Italian’s motives. When he’s not advising her on her love life, he’s professionally cleaning the apartment of a young married couple. Both the wife, who invents perfumes, and her husband seem attracted to the bisexual man, Robert. Robert decides to have dinner with all his past lovers because he’s convinced that, if he can smell them one last time, he can tell whether any of them really love him.

During the course of a three-day period, each of these characters tries to make meaningful connections with the people involved in their lives. When the daughter of the massage therapist negligently loses a 3-year-old girl she’s babysitting in the park, the missing little girl becomes a metaphor for the emptiness the characters feel as they search for that one intimate contact which can restore their hope in love and life.

“The senses are elemental,” says the director and co-writer of THE FIVE SENSES, Jeremy Podeswa. “In connecting us to the world, they connect us to others.” His movie is an intricately plotted, engrossing story of friends, lovers and families. Although not all the stories end completely happily, the movie leaves the audience with a sense of faith in people and even a generic faith in God. In fact, God answers an important prayer from the mother of the missing child. Thus, THE FIVE SENSES is a movie about trusting in God as well as trusting in life and love. It also, however, urges people to follow their emotions rather than their mind (a romantic, non-biblical worldview) and includes some foul language; strong homosexual, bisexual and cross-dressing elements; gratuitous sex scenes; and other unnecessary miscellaneous immorality.

Finally, three minor plot twists lend an air of contrived political correctness to the overall arc of the story. This dilutes the cinematic power of the movie, which includes many poignant moments in its more moral aspects.