Imagine a life without emotions. No highs, no lows. No tears, no laughter. No sex!!!! Michael Tyburski’s Turn Me On, written by Angela Bourassa, is an oddball. A likeable oddity, nonetheless a sophisticated freak show where the actors are more sinned against than sinning.
There isn’t much scope for that. Sinning, I mean. Not when the sun never shines on this bleak dystopian emotionless haven where love is not welcome, and intimacy is unknown.
Our hero and heroine are too dour sourpusses, Joy (Bel Powley) and William (Nick Robinson), who have nothing to look forward to in this painless paradise except perhaps the pain of not looking forward to what pain means. All of a sudden, when passion strikes the couple like a thunderbolt, they suddenly discover the joys of sex.
The sequences where Joy and William experiment with each other’s bodies are devastatingly erotic without a shred of nudity. They are also very funny and sad for reasons that are hard to explain. Why does the human mind obey the needs of the body without a second thought?
The delight and surprise of knowing about inexperienced emotions courses through the veins of this rigorously unprejudiced look at love and passion in a sterile domain.
Michael Tyburski’s earlier film The Sounds Of Silence indicated the direction his vision intended to take in his cinema. He doesn’t believe in punctuating his silences with aggravated background music. Nor does Tyburski iron out the rough edges in the map of human emotions. Here in his sophomore venture Tyburski is content letting his protagonists find their own happiness beyond their emotionless dystopia.
Partly science-fiction, partly a traditional rom-com I am not very sure what Turn Me On is. But one thing that is it not, is genre-based. We have never seen anything like this before. Some of the peripheral characters at this centre of barren bliss had the potential to grow . But the film focusses almost entirely on Joy and William.
“Are you content?” is the prevalent form of greeting at this emotionless sanatorium where contentment means surrendering to neutralized disaffection.
