Sometimes a film struck us as a bolt of lightning. It is hard to discern what makes these films special: perhaps a few strong performances, perhaps the eloquent script, perhaps a director who almost inadvertently produced a magnum opus. The film Perfect Sense is the summation of all of them and perhaps even more.
The story is set in the present or near future when an epidemic of an unnamed disease starts to spread rapidly yet silently through the entire populace of the world: thus turning into pandemic. Eva Green, playing one of the protagonists, an epidemiologist, can do nothing but watch silently that the world immersing into senselessness. An emotional catharsis of any kind followed by loss of a particular sensory perception is the form of the disease: the smell is the first sense to go followed by an abrupt feat of grief. The disease seemed innocuous enough not be taken seriously: but the other senses soon follow. Next to go is taste followed by an attack of manic guilt and gluttony; then hearing followed by an impulse of hate speech and violent behaviour. And at the finality of the film the vision is to depart, leaving the screen dark, with the two protagonists seeking each other, finding each other, ending up in each others arms. The portrayal of human struggle to continuously cope up with the gradually befalling annihilation is so magnificent that it leaves one breathless. Ewan McGregor, cast in the part of a cook, trying to find the way to come in terms with his personal demons as well as the new professional crisis performed superbly. Eva Green, in her usual withdrawn way, sets another strong performance of the likes of the films such as ‘Crack’ or ‘Womb’. Her husky voice, taking the viewers through the events on voice-over, mingled with a great back-ground score brings the mood the director wanted to depict: the sense of fatalism.
In fact the entire film, with the unlikelihood of a sci-fi movie, is actually dipped into the Christian myth of sin and sense of guilt, trying to evade the demons, personal, multitudinous and otherwise and failing, and accepting finally, succumbing in a fatalistic way, finding love and self and an immense joy of being alive. The film, even under the hood of its fatalistic overture, celebrates life and that will keep it memorable for a long time.
Memento Mori.inc 