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A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)
The rhyming shots of Sabine in a carriage at the beginning and
end of the film demonstrate both the young woman’s progress and her ultimate
entrapment in her “cured” condition (which perfectly demonstrates the gap
between Freud’s diagnostics and Jung’s desperate hope for a form of
transcendence). Like many in the film, these shots are technically simplistic
but utterly breathtaking in their emotional impact. Achieving so much with so
little demonstrates the level of Cronenberg’s mastery, and time and again the
director uses minimal stylistic flourishes to maximal effect. Each camera
movement and most edits radically question the meaning of the scene that has
been unfolding. When Sabine has her breakthrough moment during an analysis
session, for example, a subtle dolly maneuver changes the two-shot (analyst and
patient) to a close-up (a “cured”, functional, and independent patient).
Cronenberg’s ability to make his camera track the shifting power relations in
this three-way intellectual dispute intensifies all that unfolds. Indeed, A Dangerous
Method is as great as it is not because it contains big ideas, but because
it positions those great ideas in unresolved debates. Sabine’s assertion that
sexuality consumes the ego is presented as a challenge, but then followed up
with a shot of her staring in the mirror as Jung spanks her. For a film that
superficially presents a love triangle, but is just as much about the debates of
a developing field, the ability to chart how the psychologists’ theories work in
practice is essential. A superficially restrained film about overflowing
passions, A Dangerous Method is an
intense as costume drama as any. 85
Masterpiece Jeremy Heilman 06.01.12 |
Exploding
the era of the costume drama with both its style and its ideas, David
Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method
pushes repression to its breaking point at every turn. A fabulously speculative
account of the torrid meeting of minds between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and
Sabine Spielrein, a patient-cum-colleague, this adaptation of Christopher
Hampton’s stage play A Talking Cure
is both technically exacting and emotionally exhausting. The stuffy, precise,
Masterpiece Theater-inspired style that Cronenberg adapts here pits repression
against radicalism from the start, opening the film as Sabine (Keira Knightley)
wails like a banshee in a fit of hysteria. Indeed, this theme is perhaps best
encapsulated by the developments that Knightley’s divisive, high-wire
performance makes over the course of the film. As she becomes normalized through
the process of Jung’s talking cure, it becomes apparent that such a cure is at
once a triumph and tragedy.