Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh | Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release

the killing kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh (screenwriters and directors) Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release [36 minutes]

 

The Theater of the Absurd is still very much alive and well in the dystopian drama, Two People Exchanging Saliva of 2024.

    Set in the grand deluxe upscale clothing shops of Paris’ Galeries Lafayette, it takes us a while to recognize just how disturbed the world we have entered really is. Although we might have guessed that even the world we might already know is obsessed with very strange behavior given the fact that as customers enter the stairs to the shops they are offered, at almost any time of day, glasses of wine or champagne as they hurry off to shop.

     The young girl holding the platter of glasses, Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), is immediately spotted by the head saleswoman Pétulante (Aurélie Boquien) who quickly puts her to work lifting numerous shoe boxes in that department, which she proceeds to drop almost at the feet of one of Pétulante’s best customers Angine.

     Almost immediately the young 24 year-old establishes an almost imaginary relationship with the older woman by speaking to her in the informal “tu” and suggesting they play a game of having long been friends. When it comes time for Angine to try on dresses, Pétulante is busy helping another customer so that Malaise is forced to help her, eating into Pétulante’s notable sales records.

     Soon after we discover one of the strange laws of this somewhat recognizable world. Upon completion of the sales, Malaise takes out a sequined white glove and receives payment for Angine’s numerous purchases by slaps to her already somewhat bruised face, counting down in this case from something like 32. However, Malaise also uses the occasion to almost flirt with her customer, the slaps being not coldly doled out as a kind of punishment as they might surely have been if Pétulante were to receive the payment, but almost as playful, even joyous moments of flesh (even if covered by a glove) upon flesh.

     The bruised cheeks are, in fact, a kind of sign of being chic or least of having wealth. As the shopworkers change from their black and gray outfits to return home, we see them applying makeup that looks somewhat like bruises, obviously a sign of their own well-being outside of the workspace.

     As the shopworkers arrive and leave from work, we also witness another seeming absurdity of this society: they exit and enter through what might be described as human breath analyzers, smelling their breath to make certain they smell badly enough from the garlic that they eat during their lunch breaks and from their lack of dental hygiene. In this strange world, kissing is not permitted and, as we soon discover, is punished by death. Since we associate the kiss with love, passion, and pleasure, we should imagine that along with kissing, any kind of physical affection is also outlawed, although the film doesn’t enter that territory and doesn’t even attempt to explain how this society reproduces. Besides, the film features to children, the youngest woman being Malaise who behaves, in her game-playing rather dangerously like a delinquent.

      Yet that is her very charm, the thing that attracts Angine to her, as Malaise now regularly becomes her preferred salesclerk, much to anger of the top manager Pétulante.

       Over the course of the nine days narrated in this story by the film’s narrator (Vicky Krieps), the two women grow increasingly closer, Malaise even going to far as to purchase a toothbrush and toothpaste from the black market, even there receiving her require slaps, as she moves further to seduce Angine.

       In the bathroom Pétulante overhears Malaise brushing her teeth, a truly taboo act.

     Certainly, Angine knows of the dangers facing her as the two women grow closer. A woman, arrested in the Galeries for attempting to kiss her husband, is grabbed by guards, her head covered in a sack and her legs and hands tied and she is slipped in a cardboard box (designed, we soon discover, by Angine’s husband), sealed up and sped off the ravine into which her body is dropped, left to die if she should happen to have survived the fall.

     Angine, coming across the very space in which the “crime” according, gathers up the contents spilled from the woman’s purse, noticing several “illegal” postcards of famous artists who have sculpted and painted lovers in the midst of a kiss. Angine, keeps the purse and its contents for herself.

     That evening, at dinner, her husband and two of their friends, comment on difficult it must have been for Angine to even encounter such an event, an act which they cannot even imagine naming, Angine finally describing it as a “kiss,” the others appearing shocked as if she has just spoken a profane word.

       Malaise has told Angine that it is to be her 25th birthday and that she shall be serving a cake, almost an invitation for her new “friend” to visit her. And that evening as Malaise bites into the cupcake, there is a knock at the door. Malaise quickly reviews herself in the mirror, straightens her hair and opens up the door to find no one there. At the very end of this film, we see the scene played out from another viewpoint, as we witness Angine, having lost courage, cowering on the steps above.

    For Malaise, however, her enchanted few days are almost over, as the now jealous and bitter Pétulante plans her downfall by approaching her and putting her mouth over the girl, declaring that, in fact, the girl attacked her. Guards arrive quickly, box up Malaise and send her into the ravine.

     When Angine discovers what has happened, she hurries off to the ravine, rushing into the endless pile of box of dead bodies, pulling them open until she finally discovers Malaise, now dead, Bobak Lotfipour’s marvelous musical score swirling us up into the emotional horror of event.

    This terrifying vision of our own possible future as we as a culture turn against empathy and disdain various forms of love, won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).