‘Freud’s last session’: stimulating dialectical combat broken by a deplorable narrative | Culture

Voltaire against Rousseau, in The fight, by Jean-François Prévand. Federico García Lorca, Rafael de León and Concha Piquer, in in a strange landby Juan Carlos Rubio. Descartes’ meeting with young Pascal, by Jean-Claude Brisville. Police Chief Fouché and Minister Talleyrand, in Dinner, also from Brisville. From the most popular roots to the most philosophical side, including politics, religion, art and culture, speculative fiction based on the meeting of famous people has become fashionable in the theater. Dialectical combats, fights of ideas, personal confrontations, clashes of egos. It is the place in which the film must be placed Freud’s last session, based, of course, on another of these successful theatrical productions, by the American Mark St. Germain, this time with the hypothetical meeting in London, a few days before his death, of the Austrian doctor and father of psychoanalysis with the English writer and professor from Oxford University CS Lewis. Science and religion, empiricism and faith.

The idea, moreover, is magnificent and full of immense dramatic possibilities. But, leaving aside the original play by St. Germain, the film directed by the British Matt Brown It is the living demonstration that an interesting conversation between two geniuses can turn out to be a mess if it is not organized, developed and visualized with sufficient talent. Freud’s last session, adapted by the playwright himself, is a catalog of passionate opinions and theories presented without the slightest narrative or cinematographic sense. Perhaps in order not to be accused of being theatrical, the uncertain appointment (it is only known that Freud met a few weeks before his death with a “young professor from Oxford”, and the clever St. Germain has imagined that it could have been Lewis ) some trips from Freud’s house where they both spend the afternoon have been added, and numerous flashbacks that contribute little to the central issues, that continually interrupt the pace of conversation, and that in terms of visualization and editing are close to horrendous.

Meeting two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, in September 1939, Lewis and Freud are two brilliant thinking beings who are antagonistic around religion, and this is the basis of the film. Firm believer the future writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, under the influence of his friend JRR Tolkien (who makes a brief appearance), the latter a recalcitrant atheist (“God is a ridiculous dream, an insidious lie”), both display their ideology while Europe falls apart. However, with an old visual aspect, the director trusts almost everything to the single phrase, the dazzling sentence and the interpretations, without ever taking care of the rhythm, the narrative and the harmony of ideas around religion, sex, homosexuality, lesbianism (for Freud they were not the same), politics and “the wisdom of knowing how to change one’s mind.”

Anthony Hopkins, who was already Lewis in the formidable twilight lands (1993), by Richard Attenborough, is this time Freud. An old man in pain from the cancer that was killing him, but also impetuous, vibrant and even with a point of vanity. From the other side, the usually bland Matthew Goode fits well with Lewis, who is somewhat fearful of the doctor’s celebrity. But the stimulating collision of ideas, rooted in The return of the pilgrim, the book that Lewis had just written and which satirized Freud as a “pompous and ignorant” old man, is dwarfed by the continuing fracture of the continuity of the story. Breaking the narrative is not escaping from theatrical language to approach cinematography. Sometimes it’s simply taking away the good material you have in your hands.

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