“Two People Exchanging Saliva” Rewrites the Slap in Cinema

One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to make of the feelings that this woman stirs in us: the reflexive response of distress, and then a more cultivated, and therefore repressed, curiosity? What could hurt so good? The film is a fable about intimacy and consumerism set in a dystopian version of Paris where romantic touch, especially the kiss, is forbidden, punishable by death. The citizen in you laughs heartily as this film, a tragicomedy, skewers the hypocrisies and ironies of the repressed West. But the lover inside also aches: the directors, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, suspend us in a state of desire and longing, the thwart