Sensation
Sensation starts as it means to go on, by confronting the viewer with banal intimacies of ordinary life and daring them to look away.
Plot summary
When an Irish farmer dies, his sole heir Donal is left some land; but Donal hasn’t inherited much in terms of social skills. Despite the encouragement of his gobby best mate Karl, he finds it hard to talk to women, and in frustration turns, almost inevitably, to the Internet.
A young man crouches by the gorse hedge of a field full of grazing sheep, pumping furiously at his crotch as he flicks the pages of a dirty magazine. Afterwards he heads back to an old farmhouse, when he sweeps kittens from his path as he navigates his way through piles of rubbish in the dank kitchen. He reaches the stairs, and there, upon the stairlift, sits a slumped figure – his father, dead. Instead of rushing to his aid, Donal (the promising Irish actor Domnhall Gleeson, who also pops up in Never Let Me Go) simply activates the mechanism, and the old man inches towards him. It’s gallows humour of the blackest variety.
Sensation starts as it means to go on, by confronting the viewer with banal intimacies of ordinary life and daring them to look away. Private moments are unflinchingly exposed, and the writer/director Tom Hall refuses to pretty them up for those with delicate sensibilities. After his father’s death, Donal is left to his own devices living in a sequestered corner of the Irish countryside, and he goes through the motions of arranging a funeral and running the farm without displaying much of a reaction. Mostly he just pines after girls. Though ‘pines’ is perhaps too romantic a word: ‘lusts’ is more fitting. He has no female acquaintances, unless you count the check-out girl at the local supermarket.
He remedies his loneliness by calling up a prostitute (Kiwi Luanne Gordon), who agrees to visit his far-flung home. She calls herself Courtney and, in her heels and make-up, looks about as congruous in the farm setting as a hayseed on the underground. Donal pays her for sex and calls her names, as is customary in the porn he watches. Though initially she sees him as just another john, their relationship evolves into something more concrete after she reveals her intention to set up a brothel. Newly minted Donal embraces the idea and sells his livestock to fund the new venture – a local establishment, that taps the market of sexually isolated farmers.
Gleeson and Gordon play out the changeable power dynamic between them with subtlety, and Sensation has the framework of a good story, but Hall, in his artistic determination to strip sentiment from the screen, has made a wilfully squalid film. Nothing feels romanticized, which is daring in a cinematic representation of prostitution. But a film promoted under the category of ‘sex comedy’ should aim to provoke at least some mirth, and Sensation is not especially rib-tickling, beyond the general incongruity of a potty-mouthed innocent like Donal becoming a pimp. One of the more apparent jokes is centred on the absence of sex education in rural Ireland. It’s a black sort of joke when you see what kind of trouble it gets everyone into though, and the relatively cheerful ending doesn’t save Sensation from seeming a bit grubby at heart.
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