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.