Augustine

Augustine

Alice Winocour’s film “Augustine” is appealing on the surface like many other recent French movies in its fine performances and its handsomely realized period detail but it doesn’t have much depth or originality when it comes to an intriguing subject: what ails a female “hysteric” who was used medically by doctors in late 19th-century Paris. This character-based drama remains consistently engrossing, even if it leaves too many fascinating issues unexplored.

Winocour’s screenplay is based on a true story involving one of 19th-century France’s most famous scientists. Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), now known as the father of modern neurology, pioneered the investigation of various ailments from Parkinson’s disease, which he named, to multiple sclerosis (though the film does not go into the extent and many reasons for his reputation). But his most famous work certainly within this movie had to do with hypnosis and women with hysteria.

When we first meet Augustine (Soko), she is a servant who has been brought to her knees by what looks like an epileptic fit while serving dinner in the bourgeois household where she works. The condition is ongoing; it continues to shake up her quiet life, leaving her partially paralyzed and with her right eye stuck closed.

She arrives at Charcot’s care already one of his best-known patients. He appears to be studying her along with several other women at first; then she becomes something of a star that word isn’t used lightly here. After discovering that he can induce her seizures through hypnosis, Charcot puts Augustine to sleep and sends her into hysterical convulsions before a crowded medical theater full of colleagues and officials: starchily dressed men whose eyes light up with barely concealed prurient interest as they watch this frantic woman thrashing about on the bed, writhing her hips provocatively and grabbing at her crotch.

The connection between sex and power (interest in Charcot’s work, we’re told, helps to guarantee his funding) and the notion of the woman’s erotic display as performance are one of the two main motifs at the heart of “Augustine.” The other is Augustine’s complex attraction to and willful chemistry with Charcot. At first theirs is strictly a doctor patient relationship; but eventually she starts treating him like a lover flirting subtly, growing jealous when he goes away on a trip to which he finally responds in kind.

That this fragile, growing relationship should come across as persuasive and quietly moving is a testament to the actors who inhabit it. Vincent Lindon one of French cinema’s most formidable talents gives such a scrupulously contained performance that it might as well be carved in stone; poker-faced and lethally deliberate, his Charcot resembles the hospital in which he works a grim, imperturbable frontage behind which seethe emotional puzzles that can only be guessed at. Augustine has a more open, vulnerable face but the same intensity of Soko’s singer actress, and her arc embodies Jacques Lacan’s observation that “A hysteric is a slave looking for a master to rule over.”

The visual world created by Winocour and cinematographer George Lechaptoir around these characters is one of burnished woods, heavy curtains, near-constant darkness pierced by the bright nesses of flesh and faces. Jocelyn Pook’s wonderful, lyrical score contributes to the cloistered mood of the setting while also serving notice of something about the film we might have noticed anyway: it’s basically a love story.

A certain kind of love story between characters vastly unequal in age, resources and social standing; whose emotional convergence must therefore be all but temporary fraught. Of course those very constraints heighten romantic intensity and poignancy yet they also indicate other than romantic dimensions of relation which unfortunately receive too little attention from the film.

Charcot keeps talking about curing Augustine; eventually she snaps: “You keep saying that and nothing happens.” Rightly so. Though Charcot behaves like an assiduous scientist throughout many measurements taken (in real life he apparently photographed Augustine often but not in movie), no sense comes across regarding what he makes out with regard to her case: not once does he tell anybody what he thinks her problem might be or how it could cured.

Keeping these things dark does indeed sharpen focus on sheer emotional undercurrents between two figures, but at the expense of also inevitably reducing intellectual dimensions drama. David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” (2011) deals with a female hysteric treated by both Sigmund Freud (who studied under Charcot) and Carl Jung, latter of whom she then has an affair with.

Yet the film is not so single-mindedly fixated on their libidinous crossroads as effectively to obliterate everything else around them. A film of ideas no less than feelings, it shows us struggle understand and cure woman’s ailment, thereby shedding light upon origins some key methods modern psychoanalysis.

Rather than undertaking any such investigation, however, “Augustine” simply assumes that its viewership shares certain currently received notions about gender, sex, power and the deployment medicine vis-à-vis control over behaviour. Within this nexus of fashionable but unexamined attitudes constructs one more movie romance.

And so the historical context is left with a rather rough and ready appearance. Chiara Mastroianni gives an intelligent performance as the wife of Charcot late in the film, who reads him a newspaper by Guy de Maupassant according to which: “We are all hysterical since Dr. Charcot the high-priest of hospital-harvested hysteria spends a fortune maintaining a race of nervous women whom he infects with madness provoking a demoniacal frenzy”.

Can this be right if not anything else? But we don’t learn enough from Augustine to know whether it is or isn’t. Winocour’s Charcot calls Maupassant “an idiot” and that’s it. One suspects that another film about him might be too more in-depth and eloquent in its defiance of Charcot himself.

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