"The Sixth Sense" bedazzled us last year with its supernatural trickery. This year, "The Five Senses" deserves equal success by being merely natural -being able to tell a human story intelligently. The film is a collection of love vignettes with each character cleverly highlighting one of the human senses. Writer and director Jeremy Podeswa has intertwined a human drama of finding a missing little girl with each player contributing an intriguing and equal share of the story, crisscrossing each other's lives in near perfect structure and execution. "The Five Senses" is what "Timecode" wishes it could have become. Mary Louise Parker heads a powerful cast, each member with an absorbing tangent that you merrily want to follow: Robert (Daniel MacIvor) the gay house cleaner who pursues true love by trying to find that distinct scent, Rona (Parker) the hopelessly unlucky lover who only sees what she wants to see in a relationship, Roberto (Mario Leonardi) her amorous counterpart too wrapped up in Italian cuisine to understand American courtship, Richard (Philippe Volter) the French doctor so consumed with his ominous deafness until he is rescued by an unexpected consort, Ruth (Gabrielle Rose) the massage therapist who tries to consummate her love for her deceased husband every time she touches a client, and finally Rachel (Nadia Litz), a composite of all the senses, a young woman blinded by guilt both past and present and yet using her senses to strive for forgiveness. "The Five Senses" is intelligent enough to show us how each individual uses their senses to try to escape their human quandary - some succeed and some don't.
Review of The Five Senses
