Hysteria (15) 95 mins **
The themes of Hysteria
are breakthrough and release, so why does it feel so uptight? Tanya Wexler’s
fumbled history lesson – charting the invention of the vibrator in 1880s London
by idealistic doctor Mortimer Granville – emerges one year on from its festival
debut poised awkwardly between satirising stuffy Victorian values, and courting
that audience who simply revere repressive order and nice curtains. Throughout,
its skirts are kept at half-mast, revealing knickers held firmly in a twist: it
scarcely has a handle on the British as a race, much less on the nature of
female desire.
For the most part, Wexler settles for the
compromise option of mild farce, ushering a discreet strain of panto through a
succession of well-appointed exam rooms. Having developed RSI as a result of
his treatments, Hugh Dancy's Granville vacillates between incessantly bicycling suffragette
Maggie Gyllenhaal and her meeker sister Felicity Jones. Rupert Everett turns
up, pulling trailer-ready epithets from his top hat. Meanwhile, the entrance of
Sheridan Smith as harlot-turned-housemaid Molly the Lolly (“fancy a lick?”) and
Ashley Jensen as a working-class lass named Fannie suggests the writers had the
makings not of a feature, but a half-promising limerick.
Belatedly, Hysteria
shows you exactly where it went wrong. A last-reel courtroom drama – in which
the establishment puts a woman’s body on trial, with enforced hysterectomy one
possible outcome – momentarily raises the stakes, tells us something of these
times, and chimes with those latter-day patriarchs instructing women what they
should do with their uteri: rushed and token in this telling, this should have
been the whole film. Wexler is keener to tickle than to teach us, but in doing
so her decidedly quaint and understimulating comedy turns the female orgasm
into a sniggering joke – which can’t surely have been the intention, can it?
Hysteria opens in selected cinemas from today.
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