Touched

A little over a decade ago, ‘The Sessions’, a film starring Helen Hunt as a sex surrogate and John Fawkes as a man paralysed from neck down, appeared at Sundance to critical acclaim. After several awards at that festival, it went all the way to the Oscars. Claudia Rorarius’s Locarno premiere, ‘Touched’, is that film’s European sibling.

However, it’s not a copy of the American film in one major way: there are no sex surrogates anywhere here. But its plot does feature a man paralysed from neck down seeking (or acquiescing to) sexual activity.

We meet the protagonists within the first few minutes. Maria (Isold Halldórudóttir) has just resumed a job in which she has to tend to Alex (Stavros Zafeiris), whose lower limbs have muscles no longer in normal use. At this point, there are no real sparks flying, but Rorarius immediately establishes a frank, medically attuned depiction of the body, as an older nurse shows and teaches the younger woman to tend to Alex.

She moves him here and there, then she readies his genitals for the insertion of a catheter. This is shown without the clever blocking Hollywood deploys for these situations. We get a closeup of catheterisation with foreskin, tube and all. It’s a bit shocking to be so frontloaded, but perhaps the idea is to signal the audience: “get comfortable, there’s more nudity coming”. It’s no spoiler to say, for the squeamish or the prudish, that’s as heightened as it gets.

Not long after, Maria becomes enamoured of her patient. Perhaps her being overweight and lonely has something to do with it, but it is regrettable that not much is made of the romantic process. Maria does come to her patient’s rescue when he somehow wheels himself inside the institution’s pool. And yet, it doesn’t feel quite like that is the magic moment when affection dawns. Some connective tissue is missing in the storytelling.

It is doubly puzzling that not much is said about Maria’s background and the reason for her extreme aloneness. She is never shown with friends or family, which seems a bit stingy, given the film’s runtime of over two hours. Surely, some of the overlong scenes could have made way for something more substantial. What we get is Maria starting and ending the film as though her life revolves around her work and her ward, which is possible, but still requires a backdrop.

Alex, on the other hand, ends up better known to us. His story becomes clearer little by little. Unlike in ‘The Sessions’ where the male character had a childhood affliction of polio, in ‘Touched’ the Alex was hit over the head in a fight. The sheer impact of the blow changed his life. This bit of context is probably a detail that signposts Alex’s typically male existence before paralysis. And some pretty typically masculine problems begin to surface in his affair with Maria, although these issues are complicated by a very human frustration stemming from his situation. Maria, inevitably, becomes a vessel for these frustrations. Given her own struggles, it’s a toxic cocktail.

It seems unlikely that ‘Touched’ will have the success of the American film — and not only because Locarno isn’t Sundance and nobody as famous as Helen Hunt is in this tale. The handling of the material is different. Rorarius makes a few directorial choices that nobody will describe as crowd-pleasing or award-beckoning. That is, of course, her prerogative, and her film looks very good and her depiction of masculine vulnerability and female vengeance have the ring of truth. And yet, one leaves it feeling that the material could have yielded much more emotion.