A Dangerous Method (2011)

“Angels always speak German...”

I've been watching a lot of David Cronenberg films lately, something which stems from both an increasing admiration of the diversity and extraordinary quality of his work and their ease of availability, particularly as several of them have been available on Amazon Prime of late. Sadly, I've seen rather more of the later films which tend to be subtitled than the older, more stereotypically Cronenberg "body horror" films which Amazon Prime seems unable to subtitle although its rival Netflix seems to have no trouble subtitling everything. Still, this superb film can't be blamed for that, and is another example of Cronenberg's late career peak.I hope, with increasing desperation, that he hasn't retired.

Superficiall this is a typical late Cronenberg film in that the camerawork and mood feel like Cronenberg and, of course, Viggo Mortensen plays a prominent role. Yet this is anything but a typical sort of film for Cronenberg to helm, being an adaptation of a period stage play that eschews the visual in favour of psychology. In every sense.

This is a fascinating portrait of three figures in intellectual figures- the well-known figures of Sigmund Freud and Paul Jung and the less famous yet pivotal figure of Sabina Spielrein.The film deals with several themes which echo those of psychoanalysis- father figures, sexual repression and guilt, and a very Belle Epoch approach to kink and kink-shaming, but also such things as social class and the tension between a comfortable yet repressed bourgeois life and a Bohemian life of freedom without security. It's a fascinating film of ideas, in that sense reminiscent of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but also a film full of repressed passion.

The whole thing is anchored by the three central performances of Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and expecially Keira Knightley, whose performance is simly extraordinary. A splendid film.

Cosmopolis (2012)

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

I haven't read the original Don DeLillo novel, or indeed anything by him: bad English graduate! But as a script it's superb, fizzling with ideas of Great American Novel standard. And on top of this we get the inspired, stylised directing style of the truly great David Cronenberg. Not all his fans will agree- this is significantly artier date than his better-known work- but it's among his best.

The ideas are superb. Eric Packer is a twenty-eight year old finance billionaire, and he's profoundly alienated from his world. But this alienation isn't existential angst, not even when he murders his own security guard on a whim in a presumed reference to The Outsider. No, this is something much more modern, alienation caused by the deeply abstract, chaotic randomness of our financial system. None of us understand it, but all of us gamble on it in some way and it has the power to wreck our society with crashes and economic storms. And none of it is real, not any more. Not even money is real: most money in the world is just IOU's written by banks, and if it was all called in then the system would collapse. It's absurd, but not in an old-fashioned existentialist sense. It's post-modern capitalism, heady and dangerous, and Eric employs a "head of theory" to pontificate about it. This is a world where financial markets can be thrust into uncertainty by the interpretation of a pause in the speech of the Chinese finance minister.

Eric, over the course of a day, seems to engineer his own self-destruction- casually ending his marriage by blatant infidelity, gambling his fortune on a Quixotic gesture against the yuan and, finally, seeking death. Only there can be find reality.

The visuals of the film complement the themes superbly: most of it is set in cars, and Cronenberg lingers over their erotic visual power in ways that remind me of Crash. The effect is claustrophobic: Eric is limited in where he can go by the chaos (that theme again) of the New York traffic as the president visits, and we see this with the narrow spaces in which he spends the film.

I'm not a fan of Robert Pattinson but he's superb here. And Paul Giamatti is outstanding. But isn't he always?

This is a brilliant film, one packed with far more meaning than I've been able to tease out, and a thing of true beauty. It is also, incidentally, notable for its positive portrayal of Muslims. A superb film.