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Jemima Bucknell

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Tag Archives: Kiera Knightley

Hysteria

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2011, Film

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Cronenberg, Date Movie, Hugh Dancy, Hysteria, Judd Apatow, Kiera Knightley, London, maggie Gyllenhaal, Meet The Spartans, Rupert Everett, sexual frustration, Twilight, vibrator

The costumes for Hysteria were something out of A Christmas Carol (coats and hats and warm sort of nonsense) and the plot resembled a sex-comedy of Hollywood’s golden age but despite all its charming drapery – and you will observe some flamboyant drapery! – this is a film about the implementation of the vibrator by a doctor who developed carpal tunnel from manually relieving several women daily.

It’s a tricky idea to take on because all humour on the subject of masturbation has been exhausted, and the comedy relies heavily on odious puns, which were evolved and retired with the rise of Judd Apatow films and are only now viewable on d-grade releases like Date Movie, Meet The Spartans and the latest Twilight parody, Breaking Wind: Part 1.

The only actor at home on set is Rupert Everett, whose character is instrumental but appears only to be along for the ride. Gyllenhaal and Dancy are repellent. Maggie’s talent was completely dried out in her exceptional performance in Happy Endings and has been absent from all subsequent work.

The film is exceedingly silly, and any audience risks being too mature for its unsophisticated jokes, and at the same time, too conservative for some of its content. In any context outside of comic ridicule, the “treatment” performed on most of the women in the film, is voyeurism, but these women are made ridiculous – they are all old and/or frumpy – and then pacified with a new kind of shock therapy. These particular scenes in Dr. Dalrymple’s (Jonathan Price) practice are out of place. It is really two films: a morality tale, about a physician evaluating his sense of duty and the invention of the vibrator and how it was used in experiments on women suffering diagnoses of hysteria. I do imagine it looked much better on paper, as its framework does so strongly echo the great cinema of the forties.

This demonstration of hysteria, vastly different from Cronenberg’s more accurate telling through Keira Knightley’s contorted vessel, seems to be boiled down to mere sexual frustration. Women can’t relate to this anymore, well not the type of women who will ever respond to it. All this film will accomplish is vibrator sales to old ladies. You’re advised to stay at home. Please yourself.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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A Dangerous Method

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2011, David Cronenberg, Film

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A Dangerous Method, Berlin, David Cronenberg, Freud, Jung, Kiera Knightley, Michael Fassbender, Psychoanalysis, Repression, Sabina Spielrein, Vienna, Viggo Mortensen

Filmed in Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, A Dangerous Method  chronicles the infamous dispute between its founders, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and the rise of Sabina Spielrein from hysteria patient, to psychoanalytic theorist. Though it appears thoroughly subdued by comparison to his previous, explicit work, it has the same psychology of all of its creator’s early genre/sci-fi films and maintains the structure of his two recent collaborations with actor Viggo Mortensen .

In the strictly patriarchal beginnings of the 20th century, extremes of female suppression caused the very corporeal condition of hysteria, and the “talking cure” experiment was being pioneered as a possible treatment. Here, Kiera Knightly convincingly and contortingly portrays an hysteric teenager whose memories of humiliation arouse and disgust her to breaking point. Michael Fassbender’s performance is that of a deeply repressed and troubled Jung, whose devotion to a talking cure is interrupted by his desire for a sexual one, and no one could appear to be wound tighter.

A Dangerous Method does not appear to have a central plot. Our gaze is shifted between several character conflicts without resolution, and only appears to touch on Jung’s anti-Semitism or mysticism or romanticism or class, pushed to the surface briefly,  and left for audiences to reconcile. It is a film that would certainly require repeat viewing for an enriched experience, and knowledge of Freud and Jung is helpful, as there’s so much more to gain from this than what is merely being said.

Some Cronenberg fans will repudiate it for the lack of graphic violence. There are no close-ups of inside-out orang-utans, no one gets shot in face, or has their scars made love to. The film is however a quintessential Cronenberg work.

Freud has influenced Cronenberg’s films magnificently, but we are shown here, how the concepts of this influence were conceived and how they likewise reflect the cinematic experiments of art and mortality through sex and violence – the director’s life’s work. Cronenberg’s protagonists are often doomed to become the objects of their own experiments, committing horrible acts in order to combat death, giving in to basic animal desires while attempting to achieve the scientifically remarkable, and in that expression, this is no different. Just as in many of his earlier, violent films we observe a demonstration of an experimental idea – but, again, no heads explode.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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