Touch

The gap between cultures and how to approach them is, for all the attempts at it, still very difficult for stories to encompass.  How much are all peoples the same no matter their history?  How much are we kept separate from each other from our background, how intrinsic is it to our individuality?  These are difficult questions which make them ripe for drama to explore.  Unfortunately, it also makes it very difficult for drama to say anything relatable about them either.  Most attempts to do so are, ironically, limited by the viewpoints of whoever is making them as they attempt to traverse a gap between being overly sentimental and overly cynical.  Aleksandra Szczepanowsa’s Touch does not fall into that gap, but it is a film on culture from an outsiders eye which does create a distance of its own.

Szczepanowsa, who also wrote and directed, stars as Fei Fei a world-famous dancer turned teacher living in China with her husband Zhang Hua (Yang).  How much longer she’ll be living there is up in the air, however; despite being married to a citizen an having a child she is still a foreign national trying to work through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the country to become a permanent resident.  It’s a long, strenuous process made even more stressful by increasing distance with Zhang leaving her feeling isolated physically and emotionally.  Trying to deal with her increasing anxiety Fei turns to a blind masseuse (Yuan) and finds herself making the connection she had been fruitlessly searching for and may be too late to take advantage of.

Touch is two stories, one internal and one external and both intrinsic to its writer-director-star.  In that sense it is not a film about the crash between cultures so much as one person’s specific existence as an outsider living in a country not their own.  It is the best option she could have taken, ditching any attempt to guess at what the Chinese view on her existence may be (except when it doesn’t) to focus specifically on her own reality.  Szczepanowsa’s script, and her performance of it, is at its most on point about her (which shouldn’t surprise anyone) and her growing feelings of isolation.  Though it is occasionally very on the nose about this more often Szczepanowsa lets small elements about her life speak to how everything is affecting her, from her distance with her own child to her changes in the way she teaches her dance students, forcing them to increase their own distance from one another.

Her camera is not always so communicative, partly because it must follow her almost exclusively as the primary point of view at the film, but also from its attempts to create intimacy with Bai Yu.  Fei Fei’s attempts to regain control over herself (something the Chinese bureaucracy denies anyone and one of Touch’s more subtle critiques of the country) lead her to the blind masseuse initially for stress relief and then increasingly for the intimacy she cannot find elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it’s also the primary point of weakness in the film while also being its primary conceit.  Once Bai Yu starts to take over as the point of view character, Touch must start making those assumptions about how something outside of its author’s experience views the world and those are unavoidably weaker than Szczepanowsa’s insight into herself.  It’s a weakness that infects the rest of the film as her camera seeks ways to represent the experience of Bai Yu’s seemingly magical massages, but instead just muddles the storytelling.

And there’s no way to experience the film without that muddling.  Once Bai Yu appears he does not just take over the point of view but the plot, moving from an inscrutable caregiver to an obsessive who can’t let go of Fei Fei even when she tries to let go of him.  It takes the film away from Szczepanowsa and what she knows so well to something that is less.  That’s not enough to weaken Touch’s strengths.  As a film about an outsiders attempt to enter a new culture it is tremendously affecting, skipping over the pitfalls that have encompassed other similar attempts like a skilled dancer or the fingers of a talented masseuse.