Sometimes, under the auspices of a director with a vision, a film’s opening shot can subtly reveal a lot, providing a prologue that foretells the grand theme.
Such is the case with Augustine, debut French filmmaker Alice Winocour’s study of the real-life 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his vulnerable teenage patient Augustine. The opening image is of a crab, boiling in a pot in a stove and trying in vain to crawl out. It’s an apt metaphor for Augustine herself (played by the internationally renowned, single-named chanteuse Soko), who will soon be “captured” and “cooked,” as it were, by the good doctor.
It’s not the last time Augustine will be relegated to the symbol of an animal. The very next scene is a masterpiece of tension and commentary: Augustine, a 19-year-old kitchen maid, serves drinks for aristocrats around a massive dining table, when she feels the warning signs of a seizure coming on. Her hand shakes violently as she fills the water glasses of the chattering guests, all of whom are oblivious to her obvious suffering. To them, she’s nothing but wallpaper. When she collapses in a writhing mass of agony, she’s treated like an obnoxious dog that won’t stop yapping during mealtime; one woman’s solution is to throw some cold water on her face to shut her up.
It’s possible that a man could have directed such a scene — and there are many others like it — with such feminist ferocity, but having a woman direct this film helps ensure a personal sense of indignation about the backwardness of the time, as it relates to medicine, class and especially female sexuality. It isn’t long before Augustine, her entire right side struck numb after her devastating seizure, is shuttled off to Charcot (Vincent Lindon), who diagnoses her with his favorite catch-all disease, “hysteria.”
But there’s something special about this patient: Unlike the nonfunctioning madwomen extracting their hair and and davening back and forth in his sanitarium-like clinic, this one has a knockout body and a sexual pulse. Under Charcot’s hypnosis, her seizures transform from pain to apparent pleasure, but pleasure for whom? This public treatment becomes a parlor trick that elicits rounds of applause from Charcot’s colleagues during live demonstrations, aimed at securing more funding to keep his methods alive.
Augustine is expected to perform her uncontrollable orgasmic contortions like a pet on command, with Charcot dangling a “cure” in front of his patient like a carrot just out of reach of a Chihuahua. But it’s transparently obvious that the longer he can generate publicity-grabbing “seizures” from Augustine, the more his star ascends. He’s as much interested in a cure as Big Pharma, which wouldn’t be in business if its products cured anything.
Soko provides a brave, committed performance as Augustine, a role requiring her to show all of herself, often with an eye clamped shut or a hand frozen in claw-like stasis. Her character, and by extension Soko, undergoes all manner of crude tests, as Charcot prods her with deep injections, bisects her body with marker, experiments on her with some kind of bizarre vaginal pump, and clandestinely ogles her while she’s sleeping. There is a kinship to be had between Augustine and David Cronenberg’s own true-life mental-health psychodrama, A Dangerous Method. But in its graphic approach toward the manipulation of body and mind, Augustine is ironically the more Cronenbergian of the two films.
There are parts of this narrative that drag, especially in the middle; there’s a sense that Winocour had a great beginning and ending but not enough meat in the middle to justify the film’s length. But Augustine is an admirable addition to the feminist-film lexicon, most similar in form and spirit to the movies of Catherine Breillat (Romance, The Last Mistress), who has always possessed a grasp of buried sexual urges and the costs of female subjugation.
Some may find the movie’s climax puzzling, but understanding that Augustine is fundamentally about control offers powerful insight into gender relations then and now: It’s that crab fighting back, on its own terms.
AUGUSTINE. Director: Alice Winocour; Cast: Soko (Stéphanie Sokolinski), Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Olivier Rabourdin; Distributor: Music Box Films; Not rated; Release date: Friday; Theaters: Movies of Lake Worth, Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables, Tower Theater Miami, The Classic Gateway Theatre in Fort Lauderdale; opens July 19 at the Living Room Theatres at FAU and the Movies of Delray.