Architects will say that the only way to represent a building is through film.  I’ve always liked the way Michael Mann shows contemporary buildings, particularly in Heat.  They’re pictured in seductive, dynamic perspectives that show exteriors and interiors to their best advantage.  Watching his last movie, Public Enemies, on DVD, I was tempted to switch off the sound and watch it drained of its narrative.  In A Dangerous Method David Cronenberg does things quite differently, framing views simply, flat-on, with no middle ground, and puts what’s important – a boat with red sails, the Statue of Liberty, and, unforgettably, a bay window – right in the center of the screen, to dramatize it.  It’s a strategy that’s also alluring.

And it’s a strategy that fist beautifully with the subject of the film, the earliest subjects of psychoanalysis.  Freud’s case histories remain powerful stories even today because they understand the objects of everyday middle-class life – a hat, an alarm clock, a train – as the stuff of personal mythology.  When the movie closes in on something it gives it an instant emotional and sexual charge.  It frames elements of the period-perfect architecture – a long hallway, the front facade of a house – just the same way, and then it moves on.  Without fetishizing the architecture, the movie mythologizes it.  Although the setting is Germanic, the lucid, stripped-down sensibility of the interiors is Scandinavian.  (The minimalist setting might also be because the movie was adapted from a stage play.)  It’s not so much that the views are packed with symbols, but that they’ve been stripped of all that’s superfluous.  The scenes (with the exception of those in Freud’s apartment and office, which are significantly overstuffed) are enervated, ripe to receive meaning.  The movie offers a clarity about things, including architecture, that’s not there in real life.

Sabina Speilrein was a famous early twentieth century analyst and analysand who was treated by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and who is rumored to have had an affair with Jung.  In A Dangerous Method she’s portrayed, probably incorrectly, as a romantic figure.  She’s played by Keira Knightley, who’s dressed in impossibly slim white maxi skirts and dresses.  In the first scenes, when Speilrein is a teenager being treated for hysteria at the sanatorium at Burgholzli, she wears a series of impeccable, gauzy, white ankle-length dresses.  They set off Knightley’s slender frame perfectly, and give off a whiff of pre-sexual Victorian innocence.

I’m spill-prone and can’t wear all-white; it simply won’t work.  But this movie turned me on to the possibilities of the full-length all-white dress.  It’s simple and dramatic, and so much fresher than the LBD.  The only caveat is to select one with an informal, body-conscious profile so that it doesn’t look like a nightdress or a wedding gown.  The fitted white Alexander McQueen dress Pippa Middleton wore at this summer’s royal wedding, with tiny buttons running all the way up her spine, was so winning because it didn’t look at all like a bridesmaid dress, which is basically what it was.  But the white dress of my dreams is the spectacularly simple one John Galliano designed for Givenchy haute couture in the fall of 1996.  It’s got an empire waist and puffed cap sleeves, and stays close to the body all the way down.  Both in print (above) and on the runway, the very ladylike dress was accessorized with a plumed gladiatrix helmet.  It’s a perfect pairing.

In A Dangerous Method Viggo Mortensen subdues his own preternatural good looks to play Sigmund Freud.  It’s a remarkably humanizing performance.  The actor takes this starchy historical figure and portrays him as a pompous, self-satisfied buffoon.  In the movie Freud wears a slightly pained expression, as if being such a great thinker hurts.  And he’s irritated each time he has to speak because it requires him to remove the cigar from his mouth.  To facilitate the transformation the actor has been given a trim beard, dark contact lenses, and a prosthetic nose.

What is it with the prosthetic noses in movies?  When Nicole Kidman donned a prosthetic nose to play Virgina Woolf in The Hours it offended me deeply.  Woolf is a personal hero I’ve always thought her beautiful, not in a Miss America kind of way, but in an misty, aristocratic, pre-modern kind of way.  She was a highly intelligent, highly privileged, and highly sensitive Englishwoman, and that’s exactly what she looked like.  Do people really think her nose was an important part of her character, and that giving Nicole Kidman a prosthetic made her more like Virgina Woolf?  In photos from the movie Kidman doesn’t look like Woolf at all – she just looks not-Nicole-Kidman.  Even harder to bear is that Kidman feels the prosthetic liberated her, as if being conventionally attractive is an affliction.  Does the nose help Viggo Mortensen look like Sigmund Freud?  Not very much.  He could have done without it.  You get the sense that the Freud nose is just a part of his costume, and that he loves it as much as he loves his Freud suit, cane and cigar.

Sigmund Freud’s office has been wonderfully recreated in the movie A Dangerous Method.  It’s decked out with blood-colored curtains, leather-bound volumes, dark wood furniture and ancient talismans, so that there’s barely space for the doctor to sit, or think, inside.  And it’s a dramatic contrast to Karl Jung’s (movie) office, with its pristine white walls and scrubbed oak floors.  Freud was thinking modern and living Victorian, searching for scientific clarity while weighed down by all of literature and history.  The sumptuously shadowed, cluttered room might be the perfect (movie) symbol for his mind.  I visited the Freud Museum in London, once, years ago, on a drizzly afternoon.  It’s Freud’s old house and office, which his son, the architect Ernst Freud, remodeled and enlarged with a small sunroom.  I remember walking uphill from the Camden tube station through winding residential blocks, ringing the bell, then being inspected and admitted by a smiling, overattentive docent, who followed me silently from room to room.

Freud’s consultation room at the museum is furnished with the books, artworks and furniture he brought with from his famed office at Bergasse 19 in Vienna, which has also been turned into a museum.  His couch, the most mythologized piece of furniture in Western history, was not at all what I expected.  It was small and lumpy; it did not beckon me to lie down on it and surrender myself to my unconscious.  It had a tapestry thrown over it, the same way college students throw tablecloths over furniture they drag into their dorm rooms from the sidewalk.  Yet seeing it was tremendously moving.  Freud left Vienna for London in 1938, for the obvious reasons, when he was 82 years old.  He was suffering from jaw cancer and a portion of his face had been removed, so that he could barely speak.  It’s tragic that this great man was was uprooted at this stage of his life.  And it’s poignant that he recreated his life at Bergasse – piece by piece – in this stodgy brick house in suburban London.