Every kiss begins with capital punishment in this alternative world drenched in black and white from writer-director duo Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata. Two People Exchanging Saliva is a dystopian queer love story set in a reality where people pay for items with a varying number of slaps to their face and where getting caught kissing is a death sentence. The story centers on Angine (Zar Amir), an affluent but unhappy woman who compulsively shops in a luxury department store. Over the course of multiple visits, she becomes intrigued by Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a charming young shopgirl for whom Angine is willing to nearly defy the prohibition on kissing. The two must figure out how to cultivate their interest in each other while sneaking under the radar of Malaise’s suspicious colleague.
The 36-minute short, also narrated by Vicky Krieps, has taken home multiple awards across various festivals that include AFI’s Grand Jury Prize, the Golden Gate Mid-Length Film Award from the San Francisco Film Festival, Best Drama Short from Out on Film in Atlanta, and both the Canal+ and audience awards at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.
Below, Singh and Musteata speak to Deadline about riskily filming in Paris, the problem with kissing and creating a world of hurt and tough love.
DEADLINE: So, what’s so wrong with kissing? Where did this idea for the short come from?
NATALIE MUSTEATA: That’s so interesting, everyone always asks about the slapping. The kissing came about as a reaction to violence being a form of payment. As we were writing, there were many disturbing events happening in the world. One of them was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which was disturbing and inspiring while all these young people were in the streets protesting this unjust, aggressive regime. There was this news story about a young couple [Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancé, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi] who had been dancing in front of the Freedom Tower [also known as the Azadi Tower] in Tehran and had been arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison. We thought, “How is it possible that we live in a world where this can happen?” It’s so absurd. Then that turned into the idea that kissing is forbidden, because maybe in this world of our short film, violence is normalized, and intimacy isn’t.
ALEXANDRE SINGH: You see plenty of authoritarian regimes where certain types of love or queer love are repressed. We wanted to turn that around by taking an act that, in Western society, people just accept as being very normal. Which, if you think about it, could be considered gross, sticking your tongue into someone else’s mouth and exchanging saliva. It’s something that could easily be twisted and made to feel strange. There are many things that we do in our society that we accept completely, that, if we took a step back, could feel strange to other cultures.
MUSTEATA: It was our way of talking about how absurd it is to repress any type of love, because telling someone not to love is like telling someone not to breathe. It’s so unstoppable, so trying to suppress it is absurd. The Seed of the Sacred Fig was also one of our favorite films from last year, and it hit us so hard because it tackled the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The movement is why we ended up working with Zar Amir Ebrahimi as the lead of our film, even though it’s not evident in the film that there is a connection to Iran.
SINGH: Nor is the film on its surface a political film. It doesn’t wear it on its sleeve. Still, we thought it would be wonderful to make this connection to this cinema and to this political movement that has influenced us, and by casting Zar, who would say everything that we need to say, and then let the audience draw their own conclusions from that.
Two People Exchanging Saliva
Misia Films
DEADLINE: How did you find Zar’s co-star Luàna Bajrami and get Vicky Krieps to do the narration?
SINGH: We saw Luàna in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. We were already fans of hers, but it also happened a bit by chance: our script was circulating at this agency in France, and she came across it. I believe she had reached out to us, being like, “I want to be in this film.” And we met her and loved her.
MUSTEATA: The film was designed originally to have a voiceover. Voiceover is such a controversial subject, but there’s so many movies that we love that use it from the Coen brothers, Barry Lyndon and Sentimental Value. Our voiceover is not essential to the story; it doesn’t give you expository information or tell you how this world works, but, tonally, it’s incredibly important to us. It was about establishing what kind of film we are entering. There was a moment where we edited the film without the voiceover just to see if it worked, and it did. We just really missed the voiceover, which is to say that Vicky came on late in the film process.
SINGH: We wanted her. It’s a French film, but our leads are Iranian and from Kosovo, so we really wanted to show a France that is multicultural and cosmopolitan. We really wanted a voice speaking French, with a slight accent that wasn’t quite French.
MUSTEATA: We’ve also been big fans of Vicky’s since Phantom Thread. There’s almost something ethereal about her, and so we waited [for her to become available]. She’s not the best with email, so we gave the script to her agent, who kept trying to give it to her, but she was nearly unreachable for so long. We almost gave up, but finally we got a response at the last possible moment we had to consider her involvement before we almost flirted with the idea of moving on to someone else. Luckily, we didn’t have to, and she said yes, so we met her in Berlin at a recording studio.
SINGH: We got a Letterboxd review of the film where some French person said, “Vicky, can you please narrate my life?”
DEADLINE: Would you like to explain the very scientific approach to your short film title?
MUSTEATA: Vicky was partially responsible for the title, Two People Exchanging Saliva.
SINGH: The film has a lot of strong, bold decisions, and some of them happened because we were moving so quickly. We had this little window of time in which we were going to shoot, and so there wasn’t time to second-guess ourselves. But in post-production, we had a bit more time, started second-guessing ourselves, and didn’t know what the film’s title should be.
MUSTEATA: We had more romantic ideas, like The Lips of Another, which really sounds like it could be a film by Almodóvar. But it just felt so romantic and not at all absurd. We were like, “Well, our film is romantic and absurd, so how do we encapsulate that into one title and really push the tonality of the film, which is very weird, and there’s a coldness, a clinical aspect to it as well?” When we chanced upon Two People Exchanging Saliva, I mean, it’s kind of one of the lines in the film. It just felt so right. But our producers thought it was ugly. They kept telling us it sounded nice in English but ugly in French. Then the English people were like, “It sounds great in French but terrible in English.” And we were like, “It’s not meant to sound beautiful; it’s meant to make you wake up and notice it.”
So, Vicky told us that if she saw a film festival program with a film like that, she would want to see it, and she [joked] that she would like to be in a film called that. Without skipping a beat, our Italian producer said, “Vicky, you can be in the film with that title.” And that’s how it happened.
DEADLINE: Why was filming in black and white important?
MUSTEATA: There are many different reasons the film is in black and white. But it was something we decided very early on, when we knew we would shoot in this store. Part of the reason is that we had to approach this practically because we were shooting in the middle of the night, and every morning we have to return the store to its normal look. So, we couldn’t transform the store in a radical way, but having it in black and white allowed us to put our own aesthetic stamp on it and also reduce visual noise.
SINGH: Part of that visual reduction is that it shows you how things really are, because color can distract you from seeing how things actually are. The building used to be a bank in the 1930s, and in black-and-white, you can really see that structure. It feels very cold and austere. We really wanted to highlight the geometry that’s already there, but it could get lost amongst all the colors in the store. We were also quite inspired by Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which has an iconic scene in the Berlin State Library. In black and white, everything is so ethereal, strong and beautiful. Our background is in visual art, so we think very compositionally about framing. Also, there’s not much dialogue, so it almost feels like a silent film.
DEADLINE: Toothpaste is banned, and slaps serve as currency. Talk more about that.
MUSTEATA: We had a lot of fun with these rules. The film is inspired by the absurdities in our own world and by real-world political events.
SINGH: But at the same time, the premise is ridiculous. You could say it’s silly, but we treat it as if it was very serious, and for the characters living in this world, it’s very serious. So, when we created these rules, it was natural to think, “Well, what would be the consequences of these rules?” So, for example, with the slapping, people get slapped when they pay for stuff. Wealthy people would get slapped more often because they buy more stuff, which costs more. Eventually, their cheeks are going to get raw, red and bruised. But as we know in our society, signs of wealth, even if they’re negative, become signs of power. So, people would go around kind of showing off how bruised they were. As we know in our society, staff in stores who aren’t wealthy would probably have to paint bruises on their faces to look wealthy. And so, this all comes from a silly little idea, but then you kind of think about how human beings behave and how that operates. So, if kissing is illegal, people wouldn’t want to be kissed. So, they would try to have bad breath. So, they smoke a lot, eat a lot of onions and eat a ton of garlic.
MUSTEATA: We have people eating raw onions as they wait in line before they go to work, breath checks, people don’t brush their teeth, and toothpaste is outlawed. We kind of just took each idea and let our imaginations run a little wild with the repercussions of those rules and how they would affect society.
Two People Exchanging Saliva
Misia Films
DEADLINE: The film mainly takes place in the Galeries Lafayette department store, and then there’s a scene in the Champs-Élysées. Talk a bit more about those filming locations and the challenges they presented.
MUSTEATA: Both were challenging, but with the Galeries Lafayette, the whole project started with us knowing we had access to this otherwise very difficult place to get. They were really on board, on our side for everything, and never interfered creatively whatsoever. The challenging part was that we had been in pre-production during the day up until the last minute, the day of our shoot, and then we just went straight into working and shooting in the middle of the night. And so just in terms of physical stamina, that was very, very challenging.
SINGH: The Champs-Élysées, you’re actually not allowed to shoot there. You cannot even get a permit to shoot on the Champs-Élysées. I think, unless you’re Mission Impossible, they’ll make an exception [laugh]. You have to be world-famous. But it was really important for us to capture some of the real world to ground the story so it didn’t feel like it just happened in this bizarre store where the rules were different. So, we shot on the subway with a handheld camera. We had to be really inconspicuous. We just shot as we moved from one location to another, really impromptu.
MUSTEATA: We were so afraid of getting stopped by the police that we only had time to shoot it once. It started raining, which is dangerous for the camera. There were all these people in the scene, and if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice there’s one man for a few frames who looks at the camera and smiles, like, “What’s going on here?”
DEADLINE: The short has been making the rounds from AFI to SCAD to Telluride to Outfest and taking home some awards. What do you think people are responding to?
SINGH: We made this film with our hearts, which we think is really important in any film. We always have wild and crazy ideas that come naturally to us. That’s who we are.
MUSTEATA: We feel that if there isn’t catharsis in film, then something is missing.
SINGH: I think we felt very sincerely, very tender feelings towards these characters, and that’s something that we tried to infuse the film with. I hope that for the people who really connect with the film, they connect with these two women, feel the love they have for one another, and see how it’s snuffed out. For example, the way Angine tries but doesn’t dare, is kind of cowardly. It’s about how people change their behavior in response to others’ expectations. I think that resonates with their experiences of the world. It’s an absurd story, but the way the human beings in this world behave is the same as in our world.
MUSTEATA: I think there’s a sort of WTF to the film too that people really love, and it’s funny. There’s an emotional connection that people really respond to. It was one of the hardest things about writing and making this film was threading that needle between the funny, the dark, the kind of whimsical, the craziness, but then also this very sincere, tender story.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
