Day 82: A Dangerous Method

Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) are drawn together due to their interest in psychoanalysis. Freud hopes that Jung will take over after he is gone as he believes they share a common understanding about its practice, but irreparable problems occur when Jung wants to go beyond simply discovering mental health issues and wants to try and help people. Throughout their relationship, Jung has a monumentally inappropriate relationship with one of his patients, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), which creates additional problems for his relationship with Freud.

Monumentally inappropriate relationship, man alive. She comes to you for help with her issues concerning her sexuality and you help her, but then you have sex with her. And during the sex you actually use what she tells you in the therapy sessions. Dude, just, no. She likes being spanked and it stems from the humiliation she felt at the hands of her abusive father, which she secretly enjoyed. While I’m totally on board with spanking, and humiliation has its place when done in a healthy and consensual way, I absolutely have a problem with him using his knowledge of her mental health history for sexual gratification. Anyway, if that wasn’t all bad enough, he then tries to break it off with her because he doesn’t want to cheat on his wife (don’t even get me started on that noise). Then later they start it up again and then he breaks it off again. You can’t be dragging her along with your problems, especially when you know she is besotted with you and is fragile in that respect. To her credit, she ends up becoming the psychologist that she wanted to become and tries to move on from him. She seems to have been doing better than him, anyway.

While I’m not really a Freud fan, I do have to side with him over Jung with one important point. Freud believed that all you should seek to do is understand the person and their mental health issues, not try to fix them. While Jung believed that just simply pointing out what is wrong with a person shouldn’t be the goal, it should be about trying to help them become who they see themselves to be. For me, the reason I want to do psychology has never been because I want to ‘help people’. That’s not to say that I would pass up that opportunity if it presented itself, I would obviously do my very best to help in any way I could. But primarily, my main interest is in understanding the many facets of the human mind and accepting them all as natural variations. People are so often quick to slap a label on someone and say that this is how they are a deviant of the norm. There is no norm, I think. And I want to hear about and try my best to understand the experience of everyone, with no judgement.

The film itself was alright, I wasn’t especially taken with it. I was expecting it to be better than it was so that’s my own fault, really. I’m not a fan of Keira Knightley but I suppose she wasn’t terrible here. Michael Fassbender’s face is equal parts kindness and danger. You confuse me, Sir.

"Never repress anything."

6/10

Day 71: La Haine

Riots break out in an estate in France after a local kid, Abdel, is beaten into a coma by the police. For 24 hours the film follows Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) as they go about their day. During the riot an officer lost his gun and somehow Vinz got hold of it and he is threatening to kill “a pig” if Abdel dies.

The personalities of the three guys were interesting. All of them were angry about what happened to Abdel and the continual police oppression where they live but they deal with it in different ways. Hubert seems the most together of the three, he wants to get out of the estate and get away from the fighting. He continually has to calm Vinz down throughout the film and he tries to keep the peace between people and the police. Saïd can get a bit riled up but he mainly just seems to want to mess around. He’s telling jokes and he just wants to keep away from the fighting and get a girl. Vinz, however, has a quick temper and he wants to be respected and he thinks the way to do this is to shoot a police officer. It seems like the gun reflects how he feels inside: strong, dangerous and not to be messed with. But as the film goes on you can see he is all talk and eventually he gives up the gun, knowing he can’t use it.

Was definitely interesting to see a side to France that I usually don’t see in films. I liked that it was shot in black and white, it worked well for the gritty feel of the film.

“It’s not the fall that matters, it’s the landing.”

8/10