“Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap in cinema

One of the promotional images for “Two People Slobbering” is a black-and-white close-up of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes droopy with ecstasy. What are we to make of the feelings this woman arouses in us: the reflexive response to distress, and then to the more cultured, and therefore repressed, curiosity? What can hurt well? The film is a tale of intimacy and consumerism set in a dystopian version of Paris where romantic touch, especially a kiss, is forbidden and punishable by death. The citizen inside you laughs heartily while this film, a tragic comedy, distorts the hypocrisy and paradoxes of the repressed West. But the lover inside hurts, too: directors Alexander Singh and Nathalie Mustiata suspend us in a state of desire and longing, of the frustrating kind.

Since 2021, Galeries Lafayette, the luxury department store in Paris, has invited filmmakers to use its interiors at night. Partners in work and life, Singh and Mustata exploit the store’s aesthetic, its intense architectural brilliance, in their Buñuel-like tale of bourgeois melancholy. The film is told in chapters. The first is called “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). The narrator, voiced by Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krebs, her voice not divine but instead wistful and playful, introduces us to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naive girl with twinkling eyes, at odds with the meaning of her name. (Everyone in this dismal world is named after different instances of bad humor.) Distress will soon be twenty-five. The narrator suggests that it is inauspicious. Noticing the malaise of one customer, the pretty Anjeen (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) — angina, in English, a reference to heart disease — wanders humorlessly through the department store, convincing the other woman to play a game.

The seller and her customer. The simple act of shopping provides a cover for instant appeal. Payment time comes and we receive the shock. Distress carefully slips on a jeweled glove and slaps Anjin repeatedly. The currency in an occult world that condemns intimacy as animalistic and grotesque — “two people exchanging saliva” is another way to describe kissing — is violence. To be bruised is to be among the upper crust; Malaise’s co-workers pretend to be put out of work with drawn bruises. The brutality of conformity, the draining of romantic love, the disavowal of eroticism and human desire – these are the principles of society that Singh and Mustata paint, with wicked humor, as a society that must smell bad, given the ban on brushing teeth.

But that’s a slap. Punishment, payment, seduction, all at once. I can speak about the allusive power of the film, and its ability to reflect our sick societies. But what interests me most about this unnerving act is the spanking. Nothing in cinema is purer than the face. The camera’s love of the face is the medium’s original concern. The slap thus causes visual distortion and spiritual betrayal – as the camera runs riot against the object it loves. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it more like a kiss. Angiene returns desperately to the store, again and again, recovering from the malaise, her face red with the blood just below the surface, a tableau of her awakened desire. She has sleepwalked through her pleasant married life, with a taciturn husband, named Chagrin, who is a coffin-maker—for all those unfortunate souls who cannot live without the kiss.