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.