2010
Filmaker: David Cronenberg
Script: Christopher Hampton
This film is about the relationship that C.G Jung (Michael Fassbende) had with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortesen), with his wife, Emma Jung (Sarah Gadon), and his patient Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightly).
I would like, first of all, to talk about the characterization that was made of the characters.
The figure of Jung is the central axis of the narrative. Around him revolve the relationships that create the story. The actor shows a man of his time, born in 1875, especially at the beginning it seems that for Jung traditional Christian values had some kind of importance in the film. As a person in the narrative he is a character who transmitted fire to me, a unique inner nerve, which I think should be his own personal journey; his relationship with himself and process of individuation were the driving force of his existence and work. Jung is a man who is reserved but devoted to passion. At the beginning of the film, it is clear that he is struggling with his inner impulses, only to finally stop repressing them and throw himself into the void. That leap into the void was what he needed to initiate the processes that would lead to his most famous theories and his own personal development.
Keira Knightly opens the movie having a mayor breackdown. Her character is the agent of chaos that facilitates the transformation of everything, parallel to her mental healing. The narrative develops as she accepts her own impulses and desires, without allowing social and mental pressure to unsettle her, thanks to psychoanalysis. Her character is quite strange in a society of the beginning of the last century, where the repression of impulses is practically a law; the actress has gotten very involved in the role, she is a very real, unique character.
God! Viggo Mortensen’s characterization is INCREDIBLE. I saw the film and I couldn’t recognize him. As a fan of the Lord of the Rings filmography I found it inconceivable! But I’m not just talking about him wearing dark contact lenses, I’m talking about the fact that his look, his expression, is the same as the Sigmund Freud pictures I’ve seen. His hair, his face, I can only see Freud moving. About his character, he’s an older man than Jung, but if I had to choose one element for him it would be earth. He seems to be a patient man, who assumes the position of master and director of the psychoanalytic journey.
Of course, you cannot direct or control a journey into something as vast and unpredictable as the unconscious.
A journey into the unconscious goes through various levels/aspects of personality that are hidden, throbbing, waiting to be exploited. It is totally subjective to the individual. When Jung threw himself into the study of his own unconscious he found more than repressed sexual traumas, he found the spirit that binds everything together. That distanced him forever from Freud, who could not accept that since he considered it superstition.
Emma Jung is characterized as a very reserved woman, convinced of being part of the ship she represents and her research and work. A patron convinced of her husband’s talent.
As for the narrative itself, it is perhaps a little confusing at times. I think that a little more depth in Jung’s or Freud’s character, especially, would have given more meaning to everything. The conversations between them are interesting, they show the master-disciple dynamic that Sigmund Freud was not able to overcome.
It is interesting the transformation that takes place in Jung as a character, when he decides to forget the repression of impulses and throw himself into chaos. His last phrases in the film refer to the premonitory dreams and visions that warned him of the arrival of World War I and II.
