“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 thwarted kind.

Since 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the luxury department store in Paris, has invited filmmakers to use its interiors at night. Singh and Musteata, who are partners in both work and life, exploit the aesthetic of the boutique, a severe geometric glamour, for their Buñuel-esque story of bourgeois sadness. The film is told in chapters. The first is called “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). A narrator, voiced by the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, her voice not godlike but instead melancholic and playful, introduces us to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naïf shopgirl with sparkling eyes, counter to the meaning of her name. (Everyone in this bleak world is named after different states of bad humor.) Malaise will turn twenty-five soon. She is ill-fated, the narrator suggests. Malaise notices a customer, the beautiful Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, in English, a reference to diseases of the heart—wandering soullessly through the department store, and she persuades the other woman to play a game.

The salesperson and her customer. The plain act of shopping gives cover to the instant attraction. The time to pay comes, and we receive a shock. Malaise carefully slips on a bejewelled glove and slaps Angine repeatedly. Currency in a shadowy world that condemns intimacy as animal 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 feign status, outside of work, with painted-on bruises. The brutality of conformism, the draining of romantic love, the disavowal of human eroticism and desire—these are the tenets of the society that Singh and Musteata have drawn, with an impish humor, a society that must smell rank, given the interdiction against clean teeth.

But that slap. A punishment, a payment, a seduction, all at once. I could wax on about the allusive power of the film, its potential for mirroring our own sick societies. But what most interests me in this unnerving work is the slapping. Nothing in cinema is purer than the face. The camera’s love of the face is the medium’s original affair. And so the slap causes a visual distortion, and a spiritual betrayal—the camera running riot against its love object. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it akin to a kiss. Angine desperately returns to the store, again and again, to get her fix from Malaise, her face reddening from blood just below the surface, a canvas of her awakened desire. She had sleepwalked through her genteel married life, with a taciturn husband, called Chagrin, who is in the business of coffin-making—for all those unfortunate souls who could not live without the kiss.