We briefly touched on the name change earlier this year but it looks like David MacKenzie‘s sci-fi-tinged romancer starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green now has the confirmed title of “Perfect Sense” as it approaches its premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, (whose website also provides this first official look).
The film, which originally went by the working title of “The Last Word,” follows the story of two people who fall in love as the world begins to fall apart when a seemingly global epidemic causes many people to lose their sensory perception.
The film finds MacKenzie and McGregor reuniting after 2003’s “Young Adam,” and the cast of Glasgow-shot pic includes Ewen Bremner (“Trainspotting“), Stephen Dillane (“John Adams“) and Connie Nielsen (“Gladiator“). The script was written by Danish scribe Kim Fupz Aakeson (who also wrote the enjoyable, farcical yet humane crime-caper “A Somewhat Gentle Man” starring Stellan Skarsgaard as the brilliant lead) with the full synopsis also now unveiled.
When Susan (Green), an epidemiologist, reemerges from an affair gone sour, she encounters a peculiar patient—a Glasgow truck driver who experienced a sudden, uncontrollable crying fit. Now he is calm, but he has lost his sense of smell. Susan learns there are 11 cases like him in Glasgow, 7 in Aberdeen, 5 in Dundee, and 18 in Edinburgh. In fact, Great Britain has 100 cases, with additional ones reported in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and they all appeared in the last 24 hours. Although Susan’s encounter with Michael (McGregor), a local restaurant chef, holds the promise of new love, the world is about to change dramatically. People across the globe begin to suffer strange symptoms, affecting the emotions, then the senses.
Definitely one to keep an eye on; but the film isn’t the only project MacKenzie has in the works either. The Scottish writer-director shot an on-the-fly mockumentary at this year’s T In The Park festival which stars rising British actor Luke Treadaway as “the lead singer of an indie Scottish band who finds himself handcuffed to the vocalist of a big US rock outfit….At one point, they have to perform in each other’s sets live on stage. Of course they get together in the end.” Natalie Tena, Sophie Wu and Kari Corbett co-star along with Reverend Al Green (who is apparently the man who cuffs Treadaway) with the film now (possibly just tentatively) titled “You Instead.”
It remains to be seen when that particular project will see the light of the day but “Perfect Sense” is already pencilled in to premiere at Park City on January 24th.