Yuletide idea and a film review
Nov. 25th, 2011 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakInspiration struck, and now I have a plot idea for my Yuletide story. Not only is this something I haven't explored about these particular characters before - which settles my one concern I had when seeing the prompt: writing them is as comfy as wearing old slippers, but how to avoid following old footsteps? - but I don't think the relevant issue and era has been explored from this angle by fandom in general. Yay! I'll have to refresh my canon knowledge, but that's not too hard.
In related news, if A dangerous method had been released a month or so earlier I might have included it among my Yuletide requests. It's one of these cases where the source material offers a lot, but ultimately fails to deliver a truly satisfying story, not least because it focuses on the wrong central character. If you haven't heard about the film, it's an adaption by Christopher Hampton of his play The Talking Cure, directed by David Cronenberg, starring Michael Fassbender as C.G. Jung (this would be the wrong central character), Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein (would have been the right central character), and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud (would also have been a better central character if it wasn't Sabina, especially since this is hands down the best and most entertaining fictional version of Freud I've come across). This is a lot of talent assembled, so the fact there are all the right ingredients and yet no satisfying whole are all the more frustrating.
Let me start with some praise, because there are some traps the film could have easily fallen into and successfully avoids. The trailer is misleading and implies it features a love triangle between Jung, Spielrein and Freud, which isn't the case. Moreover, and most importantly, Sabina Spielrein at first seems to be the type of character who, if you haven't looked her up before, seems destined to end badly. In fact real Sabina's life did end in tragedy, but that had nothing to do with the time period the film covers; she was murdered in World War II, the film ends before WW I, and Sabina's arc in it is the most successful one - from patient to successful doctor at ease with her sexual inclinations, leaving the bickering males behind. Also, the film avoids cliches in making it clear that Sabina's hysteria at the start that causes her hospitalization isn't due to her erotic masochism but due to her shame and feelings of guilt about it, and that erotic masochism doesn't mean she's a submissive personality otherwise, on the contrary. The intellectual curiosity that enables her to go from patient to therapist is also made clear early on and kept throughout the film.
The film calls on both Jung and Freud when they're patronizing (Sabina or anyone else); and it deals with privilege, male or social, quite well. Cases in point: Jung professes to be amazed to hear that the nascent psychoanalysis is called a "Jewish science" sneeringly because other than himself, most early adherents are Jewish. "What difference does that make?" Replies Freud sardonically: "If I may say so, what an exquisitly Protestant remark." Or, when our heroes embark on a ship to the US, Freud and Ferencszi go in one direction, and Jung in another, somewhat embarassedly admitting that his wife booked him a First Class passage, naturally. (Viggo Mortensen's expression as Freud, listening to this, is great.) (Later on, when the statue of Liberty gets in sight, Jung goes into verbal raptures on how Americans are such wonderful people who'll just LOVE psychoanalysis, and Freud says: "Before they accuse us of spreading the plague, or after?"
In case you now think Freud always gets the better, by no means. Not only has Jung a point when he says Freud won't allow anyone but minions around himself, but the film calls him on a really big failure earlier, when hearing about the sexual part of the Jung/Spielrein affair he believes Jung's denial rather than Sabina's assertion it happened. (Since Sabina was still Jung's patient when it did, this is a big issue.) After Sabina made Jung confess the truth to Freud, he admits to said failure of believing the man above the woman, so it's dealt with on both a Watsonian and Doylist level. And while earlier it's Freud who is master if the art of verbal traps, at the end it's Sabina who traps him into admitting that what he has just denied, that there is a dispute with Jung, and into conceding the larger intellectual point of their conversation about the way eros and death urge relate.
So given all this, why didn't I love the film? Again, the biggest problem is the focus on Jung. Sabina and Freud drift in and out of his life at different points, and so we get only snapshots of them, which means that Sabina's development which should come across as organic - getting a grip on her "hysteria" via "the talking cure" of the original title, resuming her medical studies, dealing with the end of her affair with Jung, qualifying in psychoanalyis, becoming not just one of the earliest female therapist but one Freud entrusts several of his own patients with - comes across in jerky steps. Now she's hospitalized, now she's not, now she's in Zurich, now she's in Vienna. By the end, when Jung's wife codedly asks her to resume her affair because Jung needs an erotic babysitter, Sabina nicely but firmly says thanks but no thanks, which is great, except that she's married at that point and we never saw the husband because Jung doesn't.
Then there's the way Jung is simply bland. If he weren't played by Michael Fassbender, you wouldn't understand at all what Sabina or Freud ever see in him, and as it is, it's still something of a mystery. (Well, okay, he's the first person to encourage Sabina as a doctor-to-be, and he does initially help her, but transference only explains so much.) And he's more in the film than anyone else. It doesn't help that Hampton's shorthand of what the big arguments between him and Freud were actually about isn't enough for newbies and too generic if you've read either man's writings.
Lastly: despite Cronenberg as a director, the film is incredibly stagey. No, I don't think it's all Hampton's fault. "Dangerous Liasons" was him adapting his own play as well, and that was a very cinematic film as a result. Whereas here you wonder what exactly Cronenberg's contribution was, because it really comes across as a filmed stage play.
In conclusion: frustrating, but just with enough to hold my interest that I wish someone would write stories based on it.
In related news, if A dangerous method had been released a month or so earlier I might have included it among my Yuletide requests. It's one of these cases where the source material offers a lot, but ultimately fails to deliver a truly satisfying story, not least because it focuses on the wrong central character. If you haven't heard about the film, it's an adaption by Christopher Hampton of his play The Talking Cure, directed by David Cronenberg, starring Michael Fassbender as C.G. Jung (this would be the wrong central character), Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein (would have been the right central character), and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud (would also have been a better central character if it wasn't Sabina, especially since this is hands down the best and most entertaining fictional version of Freud I've come across). This is a lot of talent assembled, so the fact there are all the right ingredients and yet no satisfying whole are all the more frustrating.
Let me start with some praise, because there are some traps the film could have easily fallen into and successfully avoids. The trailer is misleading and implies it features a love triangle between Jung, Spielrein and Freud, which isn't the case. Moreover, and most importantly, Sabina Spielrein at first seems to be the type of character who, if you haven't looked her up before, seems destined to end badly. In fact real Sabina's life did end in tragedy, but that had nothing to do with the time period the film covers; she was murdered in World War II, the film ends before WW I, and Sabina's arc in it is the most successful one - from patient to successful doctor at ease with her sexual inclinations, leaving the bickering males behind. Also, the film avoids cliches in making it clear that Sabina's hysteria at the start that causes her hospitalization isn't due to her erotic masochism but due to her shame and feelings of guilt about it, and that erotic masochism doesn't mean she's a submissive personality otherwise, on the contrary. The intellectual curiosity that enables her to go from patient to therapist is also made clear early on and kept throughout the film.
The film calls on both Jung and Freud when they're patronizing (Sabina or anyone else); and it deals with privilege, male or social, quite well. Cases in point: Jung professes to be amazed to hear that the nascent psychoanalysis is called a "Jewish science" sneeringly because other than himself, most early adherents are Jewish. "What difference does that make?" Replies Freud sardonically: "If I may say so, what an exquisitly Protestant remark." Or, when our heroes embark on a ship to the US, Freud and Ferencszi go in one direction, and Jung in another, somewhat embarassedly admitting that his wife booked him a First Class passage, naturally. (Viggo Mortensen's expression as Freud, listening to this, is great.) (Later on, when the statue of Liberty gets in sight, Jung goes into verbal raptures on how Americans are such wonderful people who'll just LOVE psychoanalysis, and Freud says: "Before they accuse us of spreading the plague, or after?"
In case you now think Freud always gets the better, by no means. Not only has Jung a point when he says Freud won't allow anyone but minions around himself, but the film calls him on a really big failure earlier, when hearing about the sexual part of the Jung/Spielrein affair he believes Jung's denial rather than Sabina's assertion it happened. (Since Sabina was still Jung's patient when it did, this is a big issue.) After Sabina made Jung confess the truth to Freud, he admits to said failure of believing the man above the woman, so it's dealt with on both a Watsonian and Doylist level. And while earlier it's Freud who is master if the art of verbal traps, at the end it's Sabina who traps him into admitting that what he has just denied, that there is a dispute with Jung, and into conceding the larger intellectual point of their conversation about the way eros and death urge relate.
So given all this, why didn't I love the film? Again, the biggest problem is the focus on Jung. Sabina and Freud drift in and out of his life at different points, and so we get only snapshots of them, which means that Sabina's development which should come across as organic - getting a grip on her "hysteria" via "the talking cure" of the original title, resuming her medical studies, dealing with the end of her affair with Jung, qualifying in psychoanalyis, becoming not just one of the earliest female therapist but one Freud entrusts several of his own patients with - comes across in jerky steps. Now she's hospitalized, now she's not, now she's in Zurich, now she's in Vienna. By the end, when Jung's wife codedly asks her to resume her affair because Jung needs an erotic babysitter, Sabina nicely but firmly says thanks but no thanks, which is great, except that she's married at that point and we never saw the husband because Jung doesn't.
Then there's the way Jung is simply bland. If he weren't played by Michael Fassbender, you wouldn't understand at all what Sabina or Freud ever see in him, and as it is, it's still something of a mystery. (Well, okay, he's the first person to encourage Sabina as a doctor-to-be, and he does initially help her, but transference only explains so much.) And he's more in the film than anyone else. It doesn't help that Hampton's shorthand of what the big arguments between him and Freud were actually about isn't enough for newbies and too generic if you've read either man's writings.
Lastly: despite Cronenberg as a director, the film is incredibly stagey. No, I don't think it's all Hampton's fault. "Dangerous Liasons" was him adapting his own play as well, and that was a very cinematic film as a result. Whereas here you wonder what exactly Cronenberg's contribution was, because it really comes across as a filmed stage play.
In conclusion: frustrating, but just with enough to hold my interest that I wish someone would write stories based on it.
