“I’m just five. I don’t know how to start a story. Should I just start it plainly?” These words set the tone of a complicated tale of an art conservator’s brush with members of an obscure church in Jasminum, by Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski. Natasha, a ‘gifted artist’ according to the introduction provided by her little daughter Genie, is commissioned to restore the altar painting at the St Roch’s church but she is more interested in decoding the mystery and aura that surround its monks, who are rumored to exude rich body odors like birdcherry and plum. Genie’s innocent narration of this bizarre plot is a clever deception, for Natasha’s efforts to decipher and prepare smells is a complicated journey of clues and legends. The director expects the audience to work out the explanations to Genie’s simple pronouncements and keep pace the unfolding mystery. The hunt for the perfect ‘perfume’ symbolizes the search for happiness and love in Kolski’s film. Through Natasha’s experiences, we get a glimpse into Kolski’s understanding of the elusive search for eternal love. Through Genie, he shows his skepticism of people’s claims of finding the goal. But his solution to the ‘mystery’ is not a pessimistic, disillusioning affair. Kolski treats his backdrop, the church, lightheartedly. A good humored but shrewdly observant Father who believes in ‘taking it easy’ is joined by a comical but lovable cook. Monks appear out of nowhere and escape suddenly after confessing to deception, only to reappear. A deeply tragic love story lies buried in its own premises but the church members are unfazed. The Father takes pride in the fact that the smelling monks are irresistible to the opposite sex.

If Jasminum uses mysterious smells to decipher love, Reobeu Tokeo (Love Talk) written and directed by Lee Yoon-Ki, a film about Koreans living in the US, very simply discusses love. The issues are almost the same, an eternal search for the elusive love, the loneliness and desperation that accompanies the journey.  Youngshin, a radio jockey, counsels people on relationships. During her discussions, she finds parallels in her own life, though she has not much in common with her callers except that they are all Koreans. As this story of conversations proceeds, it engages the audiences in some serious deliberation on people and their affairs. The movie itself raises the question that the audience may ask – “Are we only talking?” Minsuk, a middle-aged woman, who asks this question, makes Youngshin acutely aware of her own insecurities. Minsuk is unable to find the freedom that drove her to leave South Korea or the love that is seemingly incompatible with the former. Reobeu Tokeo is essentially about isolated existences. There is a need to distance oneself from relationships that hurt, yet one is constantly drawn towards them.

No film has presented a more frustrating picture of loneliness and the superficiality of relationships than Den Brysomme Mannen (The Bothersome Man). The Norwegian film captures what Jasminum and Reobeu Tokeo only suggest. Jens Lein, the director, is completely pessimistic about the possibility of finding love, and seems to find the world devoid of any emotions. His protagonist, Andreas, is in a strange city where he has a good job and apartment. But he ‘bothers’ the rest of world by craving for more. His disillusioning attempt to find feelings he possesses in others culminates in a never-ending kiss he witnesses in a station where the couple keep their eyes open all the time and do not seem to notice that Andreas has just flung himself in front of a train. The director successfully kills our only hope of escaping this painful emptiness when the protagonist, who is hit by four consecutive trains, fails to kill himself. But the very fact that he disturbs the seemingly blissful life led by the people around him proves that there is something the others are trying to ignore: their ability to feel things. The city’s people feel the need to assert that everybody loves their life, which probably indicates a deep-seated insecurity.

While the three films express the filmmakers’ skepticism and pessimism about the prospect of finding love, Danish filmmaker Pernille Fischer Christensen locates it in the unlikeliest of places. In En Soap, what brings Charlotte and Veronica together is that they don’t know what they are seeking. In one of the few films screened at the International Film Festival of India which explored alternate sexualities, En Soap is about Charlotte, who is completely bored with life. Veronica, her transsexual neighbor, is struggling to cope with the consequences of the choice she has made. Veronica chose to dress like a woman, take up sewing, and watch fussy soap operas. For her, the permission to get a sex-change operation seemed like the logical conclusion to her troubles. But she does not consider whether she wants the operation until meeting Charlotte. Charlotte is a woman who hates bright shades and frills, and finds Veronica’s involvement in the soaps amusing. She struggles against her feelings for a transsexual but eventually realizes that even something like a sex-change operation cannot change them. Lined up among a series of disillusioning films, En Soap truly lifts one’s spirit by offering the mirage, the possibility of finding love.