Two People Exchanging Saliva

We’re used to it now in almost every film, but back when the Hays Code applied, so film made in the US was allowed to show a kiss which lasted longer than three seconds. Kissing is dangerous. It’s one thing to communicate the sexual desirability of women – Hollywood could hardly exist without that – or to show characters falling in love; but to bring them both together and to show women’s desire was too powerful, threatening the social order. We shouldn’t be surprised. Kissing has been, and still is, a strictly private thing in many human societies, or something that only specific classes of people are allowed to do. Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s Oscar-nominated fable imagines a society in which it is forbidden altogether.

It opens with two men carrying a long, narrow box into a van. We can hear muffled screams and banging sounds. We follow the van out of the city until it stops in a wooded area and the men remove the box, carrying it a little awkwardly between them. Observed from a distance, it takes on the character of a comedy sketch, foregrounding the absurdity of the situation – until, abruptly, the men fling the box over the edge of a cliff and go on their way.

This, we will learn, is the punishment for kissing. Bizarrely, some people do it in public, and it seems to be happening more now, or so people say. In the luxury boutique where she has recently become employed, 24-year-old sales assistant Malaise (Luàna Bajrami) overhears a lot of gossip. Her neighbour echoes these concerns as he presses up close outside the door of her apartment, offering her garlic gum with which to protect herself from such perverts. But Malaise is beginning to experience strange yearnings herself. They centre on regular customer Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), who is older but glamorous and mysterious, with one leg slightly longer than the other. They might be mutual.

It’s rare to see this level of world building in a short, and even though, at 38 minutes, this is longer than most, it never slackens. A great deal emerges through details. Entering a building, people take it in turns to breathe hard into the face of a security guard, who is presumably trained to recognise some suspicious scent. It’s usual to avoid cleaning one’s teeth, in order to discourage potential kissers, so toothpaste has to be obtained through the black market. Payment – for anything and everything – involves not currency, but slaps to the face. By playing the lottery, one might win slap tokens. When our two heroines first meet, Angine has a small, neat bruise on her left cheek. When she begins visiting the boutique daily, obsessively buying from Malaise, the beatings she receives from her quickly take on an intimate, erotic quality, and the whole left side of her face becomes covered in marks.

The impression made by these marks is mediated by the filmmakers’ decision to shoot in black and white, which works very well for them, adding to the chic appearance of the boutique and to the horror of a later scene in which we see those long, narrow boxes en masse. Everything about Angine’s life is presented in an elegant style which echoes 1940s noir, whereas Malaise, when outside work, inhabits a world closer to vérité: a world of corner shops and subway trains and stoic proletarian types who look the other way when guards drag a screaming woman off the street. Even in Angine’s world, however, there is compromise, extending much further than kissing itself. Images of works of art punctuate the film, introducing chapters. At one point, Angine acquires illicit postcards of these, and treasures them. They are a form of pornography but also a form of resistance, allowing for moments of intense secret liberty.

A reminder that fascism often begins with the proscription of seemingly trivial acts, a process which harms some much more than others, Two People Exchanging Saliva reads like a plea not to overlook the important of sexual freedoms in the current climate. It is also an experiment in cinematic form, exploring the tension which classically precedes the kiss but taking over half an hour to do it. Finally, it is a love story, and – thanks to two actors who meet the film’s stylistic needs without surrendering their chemistry – a powerful one.

Reviewed on: 14 Mar 2026