Touch Me Not (Adina Pintilie, 2018)

For a film I really don't like, I have quite a lot of sympathy for Touch Me Not. It's a film that aims to explore the hidden depths of the erotic imagination, and how women in particular become repressed in their desires by social pressures and gender expectations. More than this, director Adina Pintilie broadens the scope of conventional representations of erotic bodies, including in her film such figures as Hanna Hofmann, a middle-aged transgender woman, and Christian Bayerlein, a young man with significant disabilities afflicting his arms and legs who nevertheless enjoys a healthy sex life with his (able-bodied) wife.

The problem with Touch Me Not, when you get right down to it, is that it has a central protagonist, who is clearly a stand-in for the director. Her name is Laura (Laura Benson), and we see nearly everything and everyone through her eyes. We come to understand that she experiences rather severe sexual repression, and that the things we witness in the film -- her observations of and discussions with Christian, her liaisons with Hanna, her sessions with a grizzled-hippie SM guru (Seani Love), and her objectifying fascination with a young man with full-body alopecia (Tómas Lemarquis) -- are all in the service of Laura having some form of breakthrough in her own sexual life.

One could certainly read a feminist subtext into this approach, foregrounding the woman as the erotic investigator, making her desires the engine that drives the "narrative," such as it is. (Touch Me Not is a documentary / fiction hybrid, although not an especially self-reflexive one.) But does women's liberation need to come at the expense of others? There is a definite tone of objectification here, particularly where Hofmann, Bayerlin, and Lemarquis are concerned, even though they are clearly appearing in the film to serve their own agendas. 

And by the time we get to a rather unexpected orgy sequence, it's hard not to be struck by the narrow heterosexualism of everything on display. How much outré sex can be put on display without anyone doing anything overtly queer? It not only reminds us that many other LGBTQ artists, most notably Monica Treut, have explored this territory before. It also speaks to the perils of placing a repressed figure as the locus of total identification. The film's conclusion, in which Laura ostensibly comes out of her shell, would be liberating, were it not copied practically note-for-note from Claire Denis. Now there's a filmmaker who, like those old bumper stickers used to say, is straight, but not narrow.