Perfect Sense

Remember One by Metallica? What if all people ended up like that? A great idea to depict a relationship beginning in a world slowly heading towards collapse where people entertain the false hope that things will get better. Both Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are great, even though they eat soap. The only thing that bothered me is that the movie wasn’t devoted only to those two (documentary shots from around the world), or that they didn’t show several stories taking place in various places around the planet. (16.01.2012)

A perfect premise, no doubt. The director of Spread has made a surprisingly ambitious romantic drama with a global catastrophe as a backdrop. The result is quite impressive, but it could have been even more so if the relationship between the two protagonists worked better – I just didn’t feel any bond between McGregor and Green. The apocalyptic line works much better and it was the most enjoyable thing in Perfect Sense. What’s a stumbling block, though, is that the creators want to express way too many things in these two lines (from personal relationships, through the human nature, all the way to our relationship with our planet) and I couldn’t catch the central motif, if there was any to begin with. The resulting impression is as if someone had optimistically told me that I still have one year of a happy life left… 7/10 (15.01.2012)

The person who wrote the official distributor’s text must have lost all his senses (including his sixth sense), but mainly his common sense. Or else deep down he must really hate this movie. Which is equally as unlikely as someone sincerely loving Perfect Sense; originality and form are pushed too much at the expense of everything else for somebody to love this. It is more interesting (and has too many loose ends) than actually good; but luckily it is interesting in just the right way. (10.03.2012)

Perfect Sense is a more philosophical version of Soderberg’s Contagion, but with more modest production. With the exception of the nicely done ending, however, it is just as cold and detached, which is not the best choice, given the film’s focus on the two central characters (and their relationship). (06.02.2012)

The story portrayed in this film is not set in any particular time or place, the “hypertext” interspersing of the fictional event with authentic news footage illustrates the global impact of the epidemic and gives us the feeling that what we see is happening right now and in this world. The small scale of the narrative with a few people and one place is not adhered to as conscientiously as in another chamber film about the end of the world, namely von Trier’s Melancholia (in contrast to the procedural Contagion, both films provide space for the characters’ reactions to the anticipated end of existence rather than to the cause of the epidemic). It isn’t clear what the filmmakers want to point out to us. The pointlessness of treating symptoms instead of looking for deeper causes? The distancing of humanity from the roots of a "pure", pre-technological society? The cynicism and selfishness of humanity, which at a critical juncture gives preference to physical pleasure over atonement? In any case, there is no doubt that the subtext of the vaguely articulated challenge is hopeful: don’t deal with bullshit and re-establish broken contacts (with people, or with the world). The optimistic message will be a reason to sneer especially for viewers enthused by von Trier’s film, which conceals one layer of depression under another. The biggest cynics can choose the opposite reading and see Perfect Sense as an unintentional parody of post-apocalyptic films (the gluttony phase of the contagion looks like an outtake from a zombie-horror B-movie). Too much latitude for interpretation, the predictability of the plot and the fear of really going all out (like Fernando Meirelles in the much rawer Blindness) prevent us from enjoying Perfect Sense as a disaster thriller. The film works much better – almost flawlessly in the final scene – as a standard melodrama about a couple in love facing a force more power than them, but not more powerful than their love. The film makes perfect sense only as a drama that we willingly let ourselves be touched by. 70% (04.02.2012)