Review: A DANGEROUS METHOD: "Jung and easily froidened."

A young woman is taken kicking, screaming and laughing demoniacally into an ornate old building. It's 1906. She's not possessed. She's hysterical, according to the newborn science of psychoanalysis. A little later, twitching in a chair in a sunlit room she receives a visitor. He's young and pleasant mannered. "I'm Dr Jung," he says. "I thought we might just talk today."

So begins a triangle first professional intrigue and then ethics-breaching sexual compulsion as Jung nuts it out with the paternal Freud and Sabine the hopeful future doctor and mix it up like it's Saturday night. Jung becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the Moses of Vienna and wants to explore the imperceptible. Moses supposes neuroses are gnoses and knowses that the nascent science's already fragile hold on acceptance will only be weakened by such apparent charlatanry. The big splitteroo looms and happens. Psychoanalysis grows branches.

This is a film of threads rather than acts and while supported by sumptuous visuals is really all talk. Well, mostly talk. The mainstream sheen of this and the more recent Cronenberg films belies the treasures beyond the surface; it's subtle rather than bland.

Much of this must be conveyed by performances and we have a wealth of them. The progressively impressive Michael Fassbender brings the light to the eyes of Dr Jung that glows beneath the calm exterior of  his training as a respectable Swiss bourgeois. Viggo Mortensen, unrecognisable to the eye and ear, is Dr Freud of the LAW who feels the vulnerability of his age against the younger man's recklessness. Kiera Knightley lights up every scene she's in with the black flame of danger as her personal power increases.

She is also the deliverer of the sole typical Cronenberg moment in the film in the early scenes of Sabine's therapy. Whenever a memory approaches the pain threshold and she can't speak it her lower jaw shoots out transporting her from delicate beauty to eel-like ugliness. It's an extraordinary transformation achieved with no more than facial muscle but it expresses a kind of intimidating self-disgust and panic impossible to render in dialogue.

Two other performances I'll mention as a pair for they serve to illustrate the contrary forces tearing at Jung. Sarah Gadon (an ice and gold beauty so pale she's almost transparent) provides a Frau Jung whose external fragility belies the knowledge of her husband's wilfulness. Vincent Cassell is both unsettling and funny as the nihilistic libertine who says an effortless yes to every temptation. Anima and animus? Sure but also the rising western woman and man of the coming century.

So this is a good review, isn't it? Well, not entirely. Having established itself comfortably as a talky movie A Dangerous Method makes no scruple of talking well beyond its initial interest. The first of its one and a half hours transcends the natter fest by keeping everything we are witnessing intriguing. There's even a scene with a home made polygraph which looks so much like a Rube Goldberg contraption that I kept looking for a plastic mouse to fall into a bucket that dropped on to a scale that lifted a switch that ....  My problem is that, having established its points it just keeps them centre frame and replays them.

And then it ends. And then we get something I always wince at in films like this, a series of title cards revealing what happened to each character afterwards.

So, is this a good film? If the director's name were taken off the credits I wouldn't pick it but I'd think it was several notches above the average Hollywood biopic. We're asked to examine rather than be shocked at the sadomasochistic scenes. The performances are restrained rather than flat. There is a soggy lawn where most of the third act would be but there are indications that the creative team behind this movie wanted to do much more than play out the lives of historical figures. Still with the muddle of themes on screen father/son, science/esoterica, sex as both procreation and compulsion, etc etc, it's hard to discern the point.

There is no danger of this in the director's earlier work which was so steady and signature that his surname became an adjective for cinema of challenging ideas, mostly about human potential. Even when your old tv started going off and switching to noisy white static you could talk about a Cronenbergian experience you had the other day. These films endure because the ideas they contain have become surprisingly persistent over decades to the extent that they transcend any of the very early lapses in production standards or acting proficiency or anything deemed sneerworthy as low budget.

But since M. Butterfly, a blind spot in the career for even ardent fans, Cronenberg is perceived to have softened, lost flavour, joined the bottle of white you've had in the fridge for a week in going all watery. While Spider or Crash are roundly celebrated as real points of progress in Cronenberg's development towards subtlety, other films like Butterfly, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises almost universally disappoint. A Dangerous Method disappointed me but should it have? Should I really have been surprised by what I initially saw as a wasted opportunity of a powerfully visionary filmmaker to tackle psychoanalysis with his singular conceptual courage?

Let's look at a little context. I described the Cronenberg moment in this film a few pars up. It's extraordinary and  very few other directors would have allowed it through. Lynch, yes, but he wouldn't have allowed it the depth it gets to here. It's not just a weird moment with a facial contortion, it forces us to think about the character's past.

Wind back to the 70s film that no one wants to admit is Cronenberg's, Fast Company. It's a standard drive-in movie about formula one racers and their battle against the forces of evil big business. I used to give up even on reading the synopses of it as nothing among those spare words interested me. (I bought a copy finally as it was a two disc set which featured a pair of hitherto inaccessible early features: Stereo and Crimes of the Future.) But Fast Company has two moments in it that demand a place for the whole film alongside Shivers, Rabid, Scanners etc. The "funny cars" revving up with roars and screeches are like a small herd of terrifying alien animals, not machines. A group sex scene gets to the point of introducing thick black engine oil, not as a lube but as a kind of ritual ointment. Those are in the middle of a petrol-head movie.

The most mainstream early Cronenberg piece is also often overlooked: Dead Zone. It's an intriguing piece but very difficult to distinguish from any other early 80s sci-fi or horror. And yet there's that suicide scene with the scissors. No gore or violence on screen; it's just disturbingly ugly. And there's the sauna scene in Eastern Promises. The sex scenes in M. Butterfly and its Genet-like finale which pull it far from the conventional piece it otherwise is.

There's always Cronenberg in a Cronenberg film. By contrast, it can be a real challenge finding the director of Taxi Driver in almost any Scorsese film since Goodfellas. The only filmmaker Cronenberg feared to meet (it was mutual, btw), the cinematic infuser of Dante and Dostoyevsky with a Little Italy accent took the devil's shilling and the rest is just nuts and bolts craftsmanship. But a few seconds of undiluted Cronenberg to tell you he's still here, can lift even the soft descent of A Dangerous Method from a pure fall and give it a few momentary thrilling seconds of anti-gravity. Down but not out, he has his byline on another release this year, Cosmopolis. I'll be in line.

Review: Shame: Oblomov as a sex addict

Brandon wakes to the cool light of morning swathed in sheets of such a rarefied blue-grey that their colour must have a name like Murchison. For a long screen minute he gazes into space. He sleeps naked. It's just the cotton and he.

Any teacher of creative writing will tell you about character keynotes: gestures, utterances etc that establish them from the get go. Major Jack Stormbahn enters a debate about the ethics of a surprise attack and barks: "Smoke 'em!" Trudence Farrow fluffs the kind of small decision that will become a life-and-death one later. Brandon stares into the light in front of him without a blink. He is either void of thought or possessed by thoughts that haunt him every second of every day. It's an eerie opening.

He gets up and turns the day's switches on, shower, teeth, dressing, walking around the featureless corner between rooms as his answering machine plays out some pain: another woman has mistaken him for a viable life partner. He listens as though it's the breakfast show.

Work is all open neck shirts and open plan. The boss is a good guy and the colleagues rag each other in such a low key fashion that you know their competition is serious and seething. When you see suits in this office it's clear that they are clients. This is not the generic yuppie stockbrocker firm of this kind of tale. Brandon works at something altogether more intimidating than that. He gets out of the morning meeting, goes to the gents, wipes the immaculately janitored seat and masturbates. Hang on, rewind.

Stuttering through this is a series of snippets of his train ride into town. He sits across from a radiant young beauty and gazes at her. After avoiding it she gives in and gazes back, her smile at the power of this attraction uncontrollable. When the scene spreads out and plays for itself the pair are locked into this wordless seduction. The music is high emotion, sweeping strings in a minor key. It's big enough for a battle scene. But there's something wrong here (see it to find out why). She gets off at the next stop (he is standing close enough behind her for their bodies to touch) and loses him in the throng of the station. He pursues futilely. His self-maintenance in the cubicle tell us how successfully he has cast the incident from his mind.

Back home he opens his front door to expensive prostitutes. His laptop is always on and always connected, its hard drive engorged with jpgs, videos and camgirls. The paradise of a man who has leaped from thirteen to thirty-five without stopping for lunch. It is closeted, narcissistic and male.It is violated, according to his central nervous system, with an invasion by his sister. Their reunion is combative and unsettling.

Life goes on but with an increasing strain as her physical and emotional slovenliness stuffs its way into every corner of his inner sanctum. She's always on the phone, pleading with someone else who finally found her too irritating to bear. She's a singer and performs at a club the night he takes his boss out.

Her performance of the standard New York New York is shown in an almost unbroken close-up that depicts every nervously anticipated cue. She goes for a Marylin Monroe "Happy Birthday , Mr President" feel. The pianist keeps trying to break it out into Broadway but she can't let go of the driftwood of coyness she started with. And the song in its entirety grinds on to its tiny whimpering death. Brandon is embarrassed by it but his boss can't take his eyes off her and claps like he's just seen a resurrected Billie Holiday. Later, back at his apartment, the sound of the pair's foreplay drives Brandon insane. He might be a sex addict but no junkie likes seeing anyone else fit up. He goes for a jog.

As his private empire of self-gratification has now been exposed to the elements, Brandon's response is like any other addict's, more of the good stuff. More prostitutes, more pickups. When he tries for something more substantial his failure is a profound self-confrontation. He doesn't like what he finally can't look away from and ... goes for more of the easy stuff.

You know where this is going. I know where this is going. We all know where it's going but it's still hard to look away. And it keeps digging deeper. Helping our own compulsion are performances both nuanced and intense. Michael Fassbender, his beauty both earthy and sophisticated, shows a man whose chief skill in life seems to be the masking of intense emotional pain. Carey Mulligan as his sister, Sissy, is at a constant teeter between disassembly and mania. They are both constantly needy and greedy having both come from an emotional isolation tank of a family, the privileged equivalent of Harry Harlow's laboratory.

But as cold as the character's might get (and they do, rugged up against their personal winters as much as the one sinking the mercury around them) these performances allow us in and we follow with a fascinated gaze.

Brandon administers the self-anihillating dosage common to all addicts. His might well be the endorphin rush of orgasm rather than an injection or the next shot of booze but it looks like addiction. When he masturbates there is no joy in the thievery of the moment nor even some solemn appeasement of an erotic idol. It's like watching an alcoholic lick the whisky spill on the tabletop, machine-like, action+action=result.

This is the Manhattan Alpha planet where Patrick Bateman once roamed, tearing into the soft and perfect skin around him. But then the towers came down and the dollar went psycho and the light of even the most refined of the one percent has a grime and borrowed feel to it. The brilliant icy sheen of the New York buildings that fill the windows of the lofty offices and apartments is like wallpaper in this tale of hopeless detachment. This feature comes into play later when he must process a life-changing shock and those towers dwarf him like adult strangers around a lost child.

Shame is an intensely cinematic film whose power is only thinly covered by its steady restraint the same way as David Cronenberg's Crash or Neil La Bute's In the Company of Men. It's only February but I think I've seen one of my top five of 2012.

MIFFdrawal session 3: Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's GothRom revisits the big screen again in subtle but hearty form. Mia Wasikovska (our own) plays a Jane plain but with a wandering eye and a frustration at the horizon seen from the window doing the same to her as her life: nix adventure. Jane is a furnace beneath her composure and Wasikovska portrays this through her coal black eyes that smoulder from her poise and cleanliness. Then, as this setup demands (of Bronte and any adaptation) all this control must be exposed to disassembling chaos.

Enter Mr Rochester, master of the castle, lands, goods, chattels and anything else in his ancestors' domesday book entry. Dark and sexy as a blue pointer shark he appears in a crash of violent movement as Jane unwittingly spooks his horse while walking through a fog in a forest (blame Charlotte Bronte!) From that point on it's Jane vs Rochester and the tall dark and sexy Michael Fassbender fills a role most memorably substantiated by Orson the Great many decades ago. He doesn't do Orson. He is far closer to the Rochester of Bronte: aristocratic ad hedonistic when not lightlessly gloomy.

He's a good Roch, she's a good Jane. Is it a good Jane Eyre? Yes, because it lets its strengths (undercurrent, unspoken dialogue, robust control over light and landscape to play the atmosphere like a pipe organ) work under their own momentum and forbids the suddenness of melodrama (Bronte's book is fraught but not bodice-ripping). No, it's not a good Jane because the element that might save it from being too plain , the novel's wafting but everpresent creepiness, is turned down so low that it never quite takes to the air. Without the spookiness Jane Eyre can only be a serious study in restrained power. Is it a middling Jane Eyre? No, because the central performances are so exact and never mannered. Maybe middling because the score is a by the numbers string section wash that while not fulsomely everpresent is always unwelcome to my ears and makes a potentially extraordinary film veer toward becoming a resolutely ordinary one.

So, contradictions. I won't rush to watch this again but I'm glad I took the effort.

Little else to say but this from my particular screening. There was an audio anomaly in the first reel or so (assuming reels were in use) which had the pitch wavering down a noticeable microtone every few minutes. This was only noticeable in the music score with its languid strings but it had the curious effect of sounding like 20th century modernism as though the composer, ashamed of his work's conventionality, was twiddling a pitch control in a last ditch effort to gain some edge. It was corrected about twenty minutes in and the problem didn't return. Made me wonder how it happened, though. That pitch waver takes a lot of work in the digital realm but might only be a dirty pinch roller on an analogue machine. That's why called the duration a reel above, by the way.

Now off to find something for tomorrow.....