Perfect Two

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

I came across this text by Terre Thaemlitz in an exhibition I was visiting recently in Berlin.

“ADMIT IT IT’S KILLING YOU (AND LEAVE) SOUND READING FOR GAY PORN
....
First, having children is unethical. Second, families make democracy impossible.”

I found this provocation strangely satisfying, like a little act of vengeance. Against what? I’m not sure. But this manifesto is more nuanced than it first appears. “The recognition that having children is unethical is not to be confused with a desire to empirically stop people from breeding. It is simply pointing out an irony underlying centuries of societies using religions and institutions to morally enslave our sexualities to breeding the sons of men.”

And funnily enough the exhibition was organized by two friends who had recently become mothers. Perfect Two started out as an attempt to demystify romantic love as a unit of life production, and the family as a safe space to be in. Because even when not abusive, these forms of being together, force us into roles we didn't necessarily sign up for. The idea of togetherness was a lot on my mind at the time. How can we be together and we belong, without losing ourselves? But Perfect Two is also about nature in the center, not as landscape, not as a container of what is human but as a protagonist. So I thought of this pair in a state of innocence and camaraderie - on a Sunday run outside Berlin.

On the other side of the couple, a trio formed by two women and a child. With them, a new dimension opens - an access to another form of togetherness. But this also triggers the realization of captivity. The violence of expectations unfolds against the backdrop of an idyllic landscape, each frame a painting holding the protagonists captive in the mirage of harmony.

And while they're living out their anxieties and fears of missing out, nature envelops them, slowly taking over. The idyllic turns into fierce. The woman and the man are lost. I wanted to use montage to create an otherwise impossible dialogue between the world of humans and nature. Image wise I was inspired by the “miriskusniki” stylistic of Russian folktale books for children, romantic vivid and enchanted but also by neo-socialist painters like Şerban Savu and Liu Xiaodong. I was interested in the naive touch they bring to the figurative and tried to replicate with the cinematic means. I felt like this could bring a certain parable quality to the film. I worked with pairs and the images declinate the two shots: images that evoke symmetry, equilibrium, harmony to contrast the dissonance of the protagonists. And precisely because it was a film of movement, it was important for me to work with static wide shots so that in the end, the protagonist would gradually dissolve into nature.