Thursday 20 September 2012

Stiff upper lips: "Hysteria" (ST 23/09/12)



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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