Tuesday, February 28, 2012

I seldom leave a cinema part way through a film but even as the title sequence faded away and our heroine was carried screaming and twisting into Dr Jung's clinic I sensed that A Dangerous Method would try my patience.

And so it proved.  A few minutes into the action is Jung's first interview with the patient and we learn that the precursor to the psychiatrist's iconic couch was a bentwood chair.  This is a perch well suited to the sequence in which Keira Knightley contorts her body, twists her arms, tenses her throat, sticks out her lower jaw in simian style and answers the probing question "to what do you attribute your behaviour?" with the stranglingly grunted news that her father beat her.

Problem solved then.  We leap forward a couple of years to Jung's encounter in Vienna with Freud when we learn that Keira is now established as a medical student and doing jolly well.  The two psychs have a nice thirteen hour chat during which Freud analyses Jung's dream.  We see that this psychoanalysis business is as easy as falling off a log.

Someone, was it Gertrude Stein or perhaps Brendan Behan, said "a rose is a rose is a rose" but in the dreamworld a log is not a log is not a log.  No prizes for working out what Freud logs it as in his little notebook.

During the journey back to Zurich Jung assures Keira that she has the makings of a psychiatrist.  A new patient, himself a medical man, then enters the scene popping pills and making lewd suggestions as to how Jung should treat his female patients.

At this point my impatience with the film reached breaking point and I left.  Thank God it was a Cameo silver screen presentation so that I at least got a coffee for my £2.80.  

1 comment:

Claire said...

Even the trailer looks horrendous. Thanks for saving me the bother.