By Timeo

 Every weekday night, I go home and watch a movie on my computer. The public library's been really helpful; since the beginning of January, I've watched at least 40 hours of movies or mini-series, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.

The most recent one that I watched, The Five Senses, is a Canadian production from 1999 which stars Mary-Louise Parker and an ensemble cast of Canadians. Filmed in Toronto and SET in Toronto (I know! I know...), it weaves multiple storylines together, attempting to capture the way that we use our senses to guide our decisions for better or worse.

Each sense is given attention by a representing subplot: the massage therapist, the doctor going deaf, the chef who only can really taste the sweat of her lover, the teenager who loses sight of the girl she babysits, the gay house cleaner who sniffs his former lovers to tell if they're still in love with him. The story is slow and paced out, each one following their own plot linearly, yet cut between the various other plots like last year's Syriana was. Alas, unlike Syriana, however, Jeremy Podeswa offers little insight into the state of the human condition, instead meandering back and forth, telling us how important each of the senses are, and how the loss of them can affect us so deeply and profoundly, but this is a message that doesn't need to be said really.

The characters suffer similarly as a result. Though filmed well and played convincingly, one can't shake off the feeling that the characters are merely caricatures and not truly individuals, no matter the warmth, cynicism or sadness that Molly Parker, Gabrielle Rose, Nadia Litz, Daniel McIvor and Philippe Volter bring to screen. In the end, when Podeswa pulls all the strings together and finally reveals to us that even though we may all share the same senses, our use of them falters from person to person, instead of feeling overwhelmed and enlightened, all I can feel is tired and indifferent to the entire exercise. A good try, but there could've been so much more done.

3 out of 5 stars