Two People Exchanging Saliva draws you into a world where the most dangerous thing you can do is kiss another human being. Shot in sumptuous black and white, the Live Action Short Film contender asks each viewer how they can deny their own instincts in the face of an oppressive government. Directors Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh invite you to answer one simple question: what would you risk for true, undeniable passion?
**We have linked Two People Exchanging Saliva below via The New Yorker‘s YouTube page. The film has qualified for this year’s Live Action Short Film Oscar. Consider watching the film and then reading our detailed conversation.
There is an operatic absurdity at play throughout Exchanging Saliva, but the setting feels eerily familiar. We meet Malaise, a young shopgirl who is trying to find where she belongs when she meets Angine, a married woman who frequents the department store with an austere caution. In this world, you pay for everything by getting slapped across the face and physical affection is outlawed. If you are caught kissing, the authorities will drag you away. With daily reports of ICE agents snatching people off the street, the dramatic implications of this film feel more relevant than ever.
“As we were writing, we were between two Trump presidencies, so we kind of knew what could happen if there was a second one,” Musteata says. “The signs were already there. In Florida, Ron DeSantis was taking books out of libraries and this archaic Don’t Say Gay law was going into effect. I keep saying that I grew up in a world where everything felt like it was getting better and suddenly, we’re living in a world where, for a new generation, all these civil liberties are being threatened to be taken away. We wrote this in late 2023 and early 2024.”
“In our story, the way that people are abducted is brutal but also very banal,” Singh points out. “It’s almost ridiculous. They are put in these boxes and treated like little units, and there’s definitely a play with Amazon and the amount of packages that people get delivered to them. There’s even something bureaucratic about hitting people in the face as a form of payment. We get used to such absurd things so quickly. For these people, it’s just a job. We like to depict evil as this grandiose, big thing. I was just listening to [Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on] the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt–something that twenty years ago, people would’ve said: that’s old hat. But it’s come back around again.”
We do not see how things got this dire, but we never feel like we are lost in the interpretation of this world. Musteata and Singh introduce us to “rules” that everyone lives by showing how everyone behaves—it’s already ingrained in the for better or worse. You smirk one minute and gasp the next.
“With each of the little rules that we invented, we tried to imagine what could be the consequences in humorous, surreal but also meaningful ways,” Singh says. “Since in the film, people pay for things by being struck across the face, it became clear to us that if you got slapped a lot, you’d have a lot of bruises. Like so many things in human history, that would be something that the lower classes would aspire to. If you watch closely, there is a moment where you can see workers from the store painting bruises on their cheeks at the end of the work day. We wanted to build a world that we believed in. ”
The department store is our homebase for a lot of the film. Malaise and Angine realize their feelings for one another, but there is tension in that growing intimacy. There are a lot of stolen glances and growing smirks as these women get closer and closer to one another. The store itself, though, is impressively intimidating but carries beauty in its design and symmetry.
“It’s one of the reasons why the film is in black and white,” Musteata says. “We wanted to reveal the geometry of the store, which is from the 1930s.”
“Because it’s on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, it’s open seven days a week, and when you walk in at nine in the morning, there will be music blaring with lots of tourists and colorful clothes,” Singh says. “In black and white, you remove that sound and you remove the distraction of color, and you kind of see how things actually are–the bones of it. I think, in some ways, black and white is like an x-ray. It shows things how they truly are without distraction.”
One of the garments that Angine wears is truly striking, but I had no idea the weight it carried for Musteata, Singh, and the crew as a collective group. Much like the characters in the film itself, there are hidden truths in plain sight.
“There is this box within a box within a box element that wasn’t intentional, but it was one of those decisions that was made somewhat unconsciously,” Musteata admits. “That dress was inspired by a dress in The Conformist. That film has ties to our film in that it explores how people just get along inside of an authoritarian regime since it’s easier that way. It’s their pathway to success, and that’s certainly the story of Angine. Our costume designer, Rezvan Farsijani, is a close collaborator of Zar Amir. They are both Iranian women, and as soon as we met her, we loved her and started designing this dress together. The black and white squares actually come from a language that Alex created.”
“Rezvan suggested that it not just be decorative, or a wink to cinema history, but it should have a meaning coded within,” Singh says. “I had done a visual art project in 2007 called the Mark of the Third Stripe based around a gothic novella that I wrote about Adi Dassler, the founder of the Adidas shoe company, as if he were Faust. It takes place in a world where georgraphy is reversed and Europe is the new world and America is the old world. It’s about exoticization of ‘the other,’ and it’s about sports, calisthenics and Satan–so many things. In that project, I created a language out of black and white squares to translate the entire history into a fluctuating field of these squares as it was read aloud.”
“It’s a detail known only to us, but the design was also inspired by the women’s movement of Iran,” Musteata adds. “We decided to inscribe that Woman, Life, Freedom message in the dress itself through this abstract language that Alex created. There were a lot of Iranian women on our team, and we wanted to pay tribute to them.”
While there is a lot of amusement throughout Exchanging Saliva, we are never unaware of how dangerous this world is. When a young woman is accused of kissing her husband in the store, she is hauled away, a shroud over her head. Up until this point, we are lost in the romanticism, the photography, and the burgeoning romance, but the directors were sure that that comedy, absurdism, and their commentary was balanced. We feel the danger because everything has been so well-established up until this point.
“I think it’s a very careful striking of the tonal balance,” Musteata says. “The comedic moments really help with drawing youinto this world that is absurd, but the film is very grounded. Zar and Luàna [Bajrami], who plays Malaise, are both directors themselbes, so it was something that we all were conscious of. Most of the time when we are outside of the store with Malaise, the camera is handheld, so there is this nervous energy to it as if she might be in dangers. When we’re in the store, it’s more of Angine’s world, so it’s very controlled, very precise.”
“We have a sense of humor about the absurdity of these things, but we believe quite sincerely in, and have enormous empathy for, these characters,” Singh says. “I think that’s what balances the beauty and the horror of this world. You have to care about the fates of these women.”
There are moments, though, when they lean into the absurdity, because it transforms before our eyes. The more Angine spends at the store, the more she has to get slapped before she exits to go home. In one moment, her payment turns towards the erotic, the camera locked in on her enchanted gaze.
“It was nice to hear you describe the film earlier as operatic, because, in some ways, we really do go for it,” Singh says. “There’s the moment where the slapping becomes more sensuous, and we go full hilt. Our producers would that in French cinema, filmmakers might often pull back, but we wanted to go as far as possible in order for us to be transported by these characters.”
“In the writing phase, we bounce ideas back and forth and, over time, something will take form, but this one happened quite quickly,” Musteata says. “In other versions of the film, we explored how this economic system worked and we had answers for everything, but we found that it was more satisfying to say less and leave it up to the imagination of the viewer. Much like the monster in a horror film.”
“We found it interesting that violence is normalized but intimacy wouldn’t be,” Musteata says. “These two people start falling in love, because love is irrepressible. You cannot tell people not to love. They take this violent act of slapping one another and make it their own.”
The camera later stays locked in when Malaise and Angine share a rapturous kiss. The camera could’ve pulled back, but we have come so far with these women that we want to stay with them. A shroud of intimacy is theirs and theirs alone.
“We discovered so much tenderness between the kisses, and it was so beautiful and intense and passionate,” Singh says. “In the real world, Angine has all the power: she’s wealthy and in control. Suddenly, she comes into this dreamlike situation where everything is reversed. Malaise has all the answers. She takes control and reassures Angine that she knows exactly who she is. We used all these loving moments in between and just finish with the kiss, just at the very end. Much like the sensuality of the slapping, the most erotic thing can be someone fully dressed with just a hint of flesh showing.”
“Desire can be so powerful,” Musteata says.”
Two People Exchanging Saliva is available to stream via The New Yorker’s YouTube page.
