| Genre | Drama Romance |
Touch Me Not (Romanian: Nu Mă Atinge) (2h 5m)
A 2018 internationally co-produced drama film directed by Adina Pintilie and starring Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, and Dirk Lange.
The film was screened in the main competition section at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Golden Bear. Touch Me Not is an experiment between fiction and documentary, and addresses the prejudices of people related to intimacy.
The semi-documentary film accompanies Laura, Tómas and Christian, who embark on a personal research project on the subject of intimacy with director Adina Pintilie. Pintilie interviews the three via a screen in the form of therapy sessions, sometimes sitting down with them in front of the camera or swapping places with them.
Laura, who is single, is 50 years old and fights against her asexuality. She subsequently meets with various people to explore intimacy. She orders a Bulgarian gigolo and watches him undress in her apartment, take a shower and masturbate on her bed. When he has left, she lays her head on the spot where he was lying. Further meetings follow with the trans woman Hanna, who performs a peep show for Laura, and with the sex therapist Seani Love, with whom she tries to allow touch and at the same time give her pent-up anger an outlet. Laura visits an elderly man in the hospital several times and observes members of a touch therapy group.
Tómas and Christian take part in touch therapy at the hospital, where they explore their bodies and intimacy with mutual touch. Tómas lost his hair at the age of 13. He suppressed his feelings for a long time. With the help of Christian, he becomes aware of this circumstance in the course of therapy.
Christian is severely disabled and sits in a wheelchair. He sees himself as an attractive man. He wants to take the active part in sex, and sometimes he feels "like a brain that you carry around". He does the therapy together with his partner Grit.
Tómas begins to pursue his former lover Irmena, who works in a boutique. He follows her twice to a sex club, where some of the visitors indulge in SM games. Among the visitors are Hanna, Christian and Grit. Laura also begins to pursue Tómas. Soon after, he notices her and speaks to her out of curiosity. Laura takes Tómas to her apartment. She wants him to see her naked. Tómas agrees. Later, both lie naked together in bed and touch each other.
At the beginning and towards the end of the film, Adina Pintilie addresses a nameless you from off-screen. Among other things, she reports on a dream in which she has sex with a man and she suddenly feels her mother's presence. At the end of her experiment, she comes to the conclusion that the boundaries between intimacy, trust and pleasure have become increasingly blurred. The film ends with Laura dancing naked and to wild music.
According to a list by Screen International, the film received an average rating of 1.5 of four possible stars by film critics at the Berlinale and was thereby in the third-last place of all films in the Berlinale main competition. It was seen as a controversial film, viewers left the cinema in droves. The Golden Bear awarded by the Berlinale jury thus came as a surprise.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 59% based on 41 reviews, and an average rating of 5.8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Touch Me Not deserves admiration for its efforts to debunk stereotypes and further a necessary dialogue, even if the execution never lives up to those lofty ambitions." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".
Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, describing it as "an eye-opening look at human sexuality". She stated, "Though not every moment is fascinating to watch, most moments are, and adult audiences should find its frank presentation of the diversity of intimacy thought-provoking and possibly therapeutic."
In a negative review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film "embarrassingly awful", criticising "its mediocrity, its humourless self-regard, its fatuous and shallow approach to its ostensible theme of intimacy, and the clumsy way all this was sneakily elided with Euro-hardcore cliches about BDSM, alternative sexualities, fetishism and exhibitionism." He described the film's recognition at the Berlinale as a "calamity" for the festival.
The Tagesspiegel described the film as "one of the most radical, also most controversial films in the competition", while Deutsche Welle praised Pintilie's directorial work as a "spectacular contribution also to the #MeToo debate" about abuse of power and sexualized violence in the entertainment industry. Hanns-Georg Rodek (Die Welt) described the award as a "shock decision" and compared it to the controversial award of Reinhard Hauff's film Stammheim at the 1986 Berlinale.
Rolling Stone tried to summarize the negative reviews, describing Touch Me Not as "cinema as a therapy session"; according to critics, it is a "distanceless film that understands sex as a brittle act without eroticism".
Touch Me Not competed in the competition of the 2018 Berlinale, where the film won the main prize of the festival with the Golden Bear. In addition, Pintilie's directorial work received the GWFF award for best first film. The three-member jury included her compatriot Călin Peter Netzer. Touch Me Not was also nominated for the Teddy Award (LGBTQIA film award). It was also awarded the PorYes Award 2019.
Romanian title: Nu mă atinge-mă
Bulgaria: Не ме докосвай
Director: Adina Pintilie
Producers: Philippe Avril, Adina Pintilie, Bianca Oană
Produced by: MANEKINO FILM (Bianca Oana, Philippe Avril, Adina Pintilie)
Writer: Adina Pintilie
Editor: Adina Pintilie
Music: Ivo Paunov, Einstürzende Neubauten
Cast: Laura Benson as herself, Tómas Lemarquis as himself, Dirk Lange as Radu, Hanna Hofmann as herself, Christian Bayerlein as himself, Grit Uhlemann as herself, Irmena Chichikova as Mona, Adina Pintilie as herself, Seani Love as himself
Cinematography: George Chiper
Composer: Ivo Paunov
Studios: Manekino Film, Rohfilm, Agitprop, HBO Romania, Les Films de L'Etranger, Pink Productions, Televiziunea Romana
Countries: Bulgaria, Czechia, France, Germany, Romania
Language: English, German, Romanian
Genre: Drama, Romance, Experimental film
Aspect ratio: 1:1.85
Sound: 5.1 surround
Runtime: 125 mins
Premiere: 22 Feb 2018 (Germany: Berlin International Film Festival)
Award received: Golden Bear
Nominated for: European Film Award for European Discovery of the Year
Main subject: Human sexuality, Gender identity, Genderfluid
Review score: 59% (Rotten Tomatoes)
Parental Advisory: Sex & Nudity, Frightening & Intense Scenes
For all of its nudity and kink — its unashamed erections and BDSM — this unclassifiable film is defined by an almost childlike innocence. (Grade: C+)
It’s ironic that Adina Pintilie’s “Touch Me Not” was received as something of a provocation when it premiered at (and won) the 2018 Berlinale, because for all of its nudity and kink — its unashamed erections and BDSM — this beguiling film is defined by an almost childlike innocence. Of course, almost and childlike are the critical words, there; this is a movie that opens with a middle-aged woman paying a male prostitute to masturbate in her sheets so that she can sniff them after he leaves, so please don’t think that IndieWire is suggesting you take your kids.
Both clinical and radically humane, inscrutable and beautifully straightforward, scripted and unimpeachably real, “Touch Me Not” is a bold treatise about the strange (and often estranged) relationship humans have with their own bodies. Approaching the subject with the antiseptic detachment of a scientist and the warmth of a healer — often at the same time — Pintilie makes the case that many of us have become prisoners in shells of flesh, isolated from ourselves and each other by shame or trauma or some tragic combination of the two.
And she’s not having it. One of her subject/characters, a quadriplegic man, puts it this way: “The body is a gift, and life is a journey to experience that gift.” Coming from him, that’s a very hard point to argue. And yet, there’s a vast canyon between appreciating (or awing at) his belief and meaningfully internalizing it for yourself, and it’s there that Pintilie’s protagonist is stuck. The film itself is stuck there beside her.
Laura (Laura Benson) is a middle-aged English woman with some serious intimacy issues. Even the slightest touch reflexively causes her to fight back, and prolonged contact with another human being triggers shrieks of primal anguish. It’s cryptically inferred that Laura’s dying father may be responsible for her neuroses — an enervating subplot in a film that’s already bloated with empty air — but the source isn’t as important to Pintilie as the symptoms. We understand that Laura is suffering from this sensitivity, and that she’s eager to cure herself of it. “Touch Me Not” is effectively the strange course of treatment that Pintilie has prescribed for her.
A natural extension of her documentary background, the director’s first “narrative” feature is a self-reflexive exercise that finds a number of different ways to contextualize Laura’s body in the greater scheme of things. Laura’s scenes of sexual stagnation are shot with conventional art house austerity, the almost complete lack of color locating her in a sexless purgatory in which everything is sapped dry of its erotic value. “Touch Me Not” is awful short on levity, but its environments are so sterile that it’s funny (if only in a pitiful way) to watch Laura stick her face into her soiled bedding — she lives in a world without smell, or taste, or any of the senses that might trigger some kind of physical response.
These moments feel scripted, at least on her end. The sex workers she invites into her lifeless apartment are comparatively unrestrained, as if Pintilie instructed them to improvise with her protagonist as though she were just another client. They’re playing themselves, while Benson seems to be playing some version of herself (if that). Transgender prostitute Hanna Hoffman is by far the film’s warmest presence, a pot-bellied Brahms fanatic who’s as comfortable with her body as Laura is constrained. Touch therapist Seani Love seems more interested in expressing his own kinks than he is in discovering Laura’s. “I have a fetish for tears,” he announces, while inviting his client to scream at him.
The film’s delicate sense of reality is further disturbed when Pintilie appears as a disembodied face on a monitor, interviewing her protagonist through an Interrotron-like camera rig. In a movie about bodies, the director doesn’t have one. She speaks to Laura as though interviewing a real person (not a character), and the uncertain distinction between the two is greatly exaggerated by the film’s third mode, in which Laura visits a sexual therapy workshop of some kind at a local hospital. There, seemingly uninvited, she witnesses people who have even more pronounced difficulties with their bodies. Or people who appear to, anyway.
We meet Tómas Lemarquis, a recognizable Icelandic actor (“Nói Albéinoí,” “Blade Runner 2049”) whose complete hairlessness is the result of Alopecia universalis. He strikes up a simpatico friendship with Christian Bayerlein, a severely deformed man with spinal muscular atrophy who has a special love for his penis because it’s the only part of his body that still works — and, as he’s quick to point out, because it’s not proportional to his body’s shrunken size. Later, we’ll see that penis in action, the coup de grace of Pintilie’s desperate bid to disabuse us from our collective preconceptions of good bodies and bad bodies.
It’s ironic that Adina Pintilie’s “Touch Me Not” was received as something of a provocation when it premiered at (and won) the 2018 Berlinale, because for all of its nudity and kink — its unashamed erections and BDSM — this beguiling film is defined by an almost childlike innocence. Of course, almost and childlike are the critical words, there; this is a movie that opens with a middle-aged woman paying a male prostitute to masturbate in her sheets so that she can sniff them after he leaves, so please don’t think that IndieWire is suggesting you take your kids.
Both clinical and radically humane, inscrutable and beautifully straightforward, scripted and unimpeachably real, “Touch Me Not” is a bold treatise about the strange (and often estranged) relationship humans have with their own bodies. Approaching the subject with the antiseptic detachment of a scientist and the warmth of a healer — often at the same time — Pintilie makes the case that many of us have become prisoners in shells of flesh, isolated from ourselves and each other by shame or trauma or some tragic combination of the two.
And she’s not having it. One of her subject/characters, a quadriplegic man, puts it this way: “The body is a gift, and life is a journey to experience that gift.” Coming from him, that’s a very hard point to argue. And yet, there’s a vast canyon between appreciating (or awing at) his belief and meaningfully internalizing it for yourself, and it’s there that Pintilie’s protagonist is stuck. The film itself is stuck there beside her.
Laura (Laura Benson) is a middle-aged English woman with some serious intimacy issues. Even the slightest touch reflexively causes her to fight back, and prolonged contact with another human being triggers shrieks of primal anguish. It’s cryptically inferred that Laura’s dying father may be responsible for her neuroses — an enervating subplot in a film that’s already bloated with empty air — but the source isn’t as important to Pintilie as the symptoms. We understand that Laura is suffering from this sensitivity, and that she’s eager to cure herself of it. “Touch Me Not” is effectively the strange course of treatment that Pintilie has prescribed for her.
A natural extension of her documentary background, the director’s first “narrative” feature is a self-reflexive exercise that finds a number of different ways to contextualize Laura’s body in the greater scheme of things. Laura’s scenes of sexual stagnation are shot with conventional art house austerity, the almost complete lack of color locating her in a sexless purgatory in which everything is sapped dry of its erotic value. “Touch Me Not” is awful short on levity, but its environments are so sterile that it’s funny (if only in a pitiful way) to watch Laura stick her face into her soiled bedding — she lives in a world without smell, or taste, or any of the senses that might trigger some kind of physical response.
These moments feel scripted, at least on her end. The sex workers she invites into her lifeless apartment are comparatively unrestrained, as if Pintilie instructed them to improvise with her protagonist as though she were just another client. They’re playing themselves, while Benson seems to be playing some version of herself (if that). Transgender prostitute Hanna Hoffman is by far the film’s warmest presence, a pot-bellied Brahms fanatic who’s as comfortable with her body as Laura is constrained. Touch therapist Seani Love seems more interested in expressing his own kinks than he is in discovering Laura’s. “I have a fetish for tears,” he announces, while inviting his client to scream at him.
The film’s delicate sense of reality is further disturbed when Pintilie appears as a disembodied face on a monitor, interviewing her protagonist through an Interrotron-like camera rig. In a movie about bodies, the director doesn’t have one. She speaks to Laura as though interviewing a real person (not a character), and the uncertain distinction between the two is greatly exaggerated by the film’s third mode, in which Laura visits a sexual therapy workshop of some kind at a local hospital. There, seemingly uninvited, she witnesses people who have even more pronounced difficulties with their bodies. Or people who appear to, anyway.
We meet Tómas Lemarquis, a recognizable Icelandic actor (“Nói Albéinoí,” “Blade Runner 2049”) whose complete hairlessness is the result of Alopecia universalis. He strikes up a simpatico friendship with Christian Bayerlein, a severely deformed man with spinal muscular atrophy who has a special love for his penis because it’s the only part of his body that still works — and, as he’s quick to point out, because it’s not proportional to his body’s shrunken size. Later, we’ll see that penis in action, the coup de grace of Pintilie’s desperate bid to disabuse us from our collective preconceptions of good bodies and bad bodies.
“Touch Me Not” is far too compassionate for any of this to feel exploitative, though the inarguable reality of Christian’s condition is rather shamelessly used to endow hyper-performative sequences with a documentary vibe. The most striking example of this is a protracted tour through an underground BDSM club, motivated by a pointless subplot in which Tómas stalks an ex-girlfriend. Unsubtly suggesting that society is choked by moral norms — that we are all made to feel like a brain being carried around in a body — Pintilie focuses her camera on all sorts of floggings and fetish play, clumsily toeing the line between purity and prurience.
We’re not necessarily meant to be turned on by any of this (an agonizing strobe light sometimes makes it hard to even see it), but the earnestness of the film’s agenda is at odds with the exaggerated horseplay. In a vacuum, this could be an interesting segment on HBO’s “Real Sex,” but in the context of Laura’s psychosexual journey, it’s a faintly ridiculous fix. It’s silly here, where it might not be in real life, Pintilie’s stone-faced ethnography par for the course in an endlessly self-serious movie about how we all take sex too seriously.
It’s ironic that Adina Pintilie’s “Touch Me Not” was received as something of a provocation when it premiered at (and won) the 2018 Berlinale, because for all of its nudity and kink — its unashamed erections and BDSM — this beguiling film is defined by an almost childlike innocence. Of course, almost and childlike are the critical words, there; this is a movie that opens with a middle-aged woman paying a male prostitute to masturbate in her sheets so that she can sniff them after he leaves, so please don’t think that IndieWire is suggesting you take your kids.
Both clinical and radically humane, inscrutable and beautifully straightforward, scripted and unimpeachably real, “Touch Me Not” is a bold treatise about the strange (and often estranged) relationship humans have with their own bodies. Approaching the subject with the antiseptic detachment of a scientist and the warmth of a healer — often at the same time — Pintilie makes the case that many of us have become prisoners in shells of flesh, isolated from ourselves and each other by shame or trauma or some tragic combination of the tw
And she’s not having it. One of her subject/characters, a quadriplegic man, puts it this way: “The body is a gift, and life is a journey to experience that gift.” Coming from him, that’s a very hard point to argue. And yet, there’s a vast canyon between appreciating (or awing at) his belief and meaningfully internalizing it for yourself, and it’s there that Pintilie’s protagonist is stuck. The film itself is stuck there beside her.
Laura (Laura Benson) is a middle-aged English woman with some serious intimacy issues. Even the slightest touch reflexively causes her to fight back, and prolonged contact with another human being triggers shrieks of primal anguish. It’s cryptically inferred that Laura’s dying father may be responsible for her neuroses — an enervating subplot in a film that’s already bloated with empty air — but the source isn’t as important to Pintilie as the symptoms. We understand that Laura is suffering from this sensitivity, and that she’s eager to cure herself of it. “Touch Me Not” is effectively the strange course of treatment that Pintilie has prescribed for her.
A natural extension of her documentary background, the director’s first “narrative” feature is a self-reflexive exercise that finds a number of different ways to contextualize Laura’s body in the greater scheme of things. Laura’s scenes of sexual stagnation are shot with conventional art house austerity, the almost complete lack of color locating her in a sexless purgatory in which everything is sapped dry of its erotic value. “Touch Me Not” is awful short on levity, but its environments are so sterile that it’s funny (if only in a pitiful way) to watch Laura stick her face into her soiled bedding — she lives in a world without smell, or taste, or any of the senses that might trigger some kind of physical response.
These moments feel scripted, at least on her end. The sex workers she invites into her lifeless apartment are comparatively unrestrained, as if Pintilie instructed them to improvise with her protagonist as though she were just another client. They’re playing themselves, while Benson seems to be playing some version of herself (if that). Transgender prostitute Hanna Hoffman is by far the film’s warmest presence, a pot-bellied Brahms fanatic who’s as comfortable with her body as Laura is constrained. Touch therapist Seani Love seems more interested in expressing his own kinks than he is in discovering Laura’s. “I have a fetish for tears,” he announces, while inviting his client to scream at him.
The film’s delicate sense of reality is further disturbed when Pintilie appears as a disembodied face on a monitor, interviewing her protagonist through an Interrotron-like camera rig. In a movie about bodies, the director doesn’t have one. She speaks to Laura as though interviewing a real person (not a character), and the uncertain distinction between the two is greatly exaggerated by the film’s third mode, in which Laura visits a sexual therapy workshop of some kind at a local hospital. There, seemingly uninvited, she witnesses people who have even more pronounced difficulties with their bodies. Or people who appear to, anyway.
We meet Tómas Lemarquis, a recognizable Icelandic actor (“Nói Albéinoí,” “Blade Runner 2049”) whose complete hairlessness is the result of Alopecia universalis. He strikes up a simpatico friendship with Christian Bayerlein, a severely deformed man with spinal muscular atrophy who has a special love for his penis because it’s the only part of his body that still works — and, as he’s quick to point out, because it’s not proportional to his body’s shrunken size. Later, we’ll see that penis in action, the coup de grace of Pintilie’s desperate bid to disabuse us from our collective preconceptions of good bodies and bad bodies.
“Touch Me Not” is far too compassionate for any of this to feel exploitative, though the inarguable reality of Christian’s condition is rather shamelessly used to endow hyper-performative sequences with a documentary vibe. The most striking example of this is a protracted tour through an underground BDSM club, motivated by a pointless subplot in which Tómas stalks an ex-girlfriend. Unsubtly suggesting that society is choked by moral norms — that we are all made to feel like a brain being carried around in a body — Pintilie focuses her camera on all sorts of floggings and fetish play, clumsily toeing the line between purity and prurience.
We’re not necessarily meant to be turned on by any of this (an agonizing strobe light sometimes makes it hard to even see it), but the earnestness of the film’s agenda is at odds with the exaggerated horseplay. In a vacuum, this could be an interesting segment on HBO’s “Real Sex,” but in the context of Laura’s psychosexual journey, it’s a faintly ridiculous fix. It’s silly here, where it might not be in real life, Pintilie’s stone-faced ethnography par for the course in an endlessly self-serious movie about how we all take sex too seriously.
As Seani teaches: “You can’t say ‘yes’ to something if you can’t say ‘no’ to something,” arguing that “no” shuts us down when it should be setting us free. “Touch Me Not” desperately wants us to be in better communication with our bodies, the film’s hybrid style inviting its characters to break the fourth wall and speak to us directly. We never forget the camera is there, and if Pintilie’s characters can so openly reveal themselves to the world, perhaps we can find the strength to privately confront ourselves.
And yet, the complexity of the film’s form only underlines the simplicity of its thesis, a fragmented portrait of self-discovery shrivelling into an empty bid for self-help. It’s one thing to believe in all of this beauty, it’s quite another to internalize it. By the end of this long-winded odyssey, Laura’s problem is a lot clearer than any of the solutions Pintilie lays out for her. “Touch Me Not” points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.
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