Something to watch tonight: Monday 13 May

Hysteria (Wexler, 2011)

This is a good example of an enter­tain­ing movie that has been bur­ied by time but shouldn’t disappoint.

I wrote about it back in September 2012:

Femininity is the sub­ject of Hysteria, a new com­edy by Tanya Wexler about the inven­tion of the vibrat­or, and it is so much more sat­is­fy­ing than the sausage-fests above. In Victorian England, women’s emo­tion­al troubles were put down to the above-mentioned hys­teria and the pre­scrip­tion was to be mas­turb­ated in pro­fes­sion­ally clin­ic­al fash­ion by a doc­tor (Jonathan Pryce plays the specialist).

When new part­ner Hugh Dancy arrives to take up some of the slack he soon dis­cov­ers that reliev­ing the stress of London’s women is a recipe for RSI and his elec­tric­al engin­eer mate (the always emin­ently watch­able Rupert Everett) devises an elec­tric­ally oper­ated tool for the job.

Refer a friend

Not entirely his­tor­ic­ally accur­ate – although pre­sum­ably ana­tom­ic­ally accur­ate – Hysteria also fea­tures a romance between the hand­some young doc­tor and his boss’s daugh­ter (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a feisty fight­er for the rights of women and the poor.

Hysteria would make a good double-feature with the Meryl Streep com­edy about late-life sexu­al­ity, Hope Springs. They are both films about some­thing import­ant – and some­thing that usu­ally goes unre­marked – but at the same time both are gently humor­ous and fun­da­ment­ally inoffensive.

Today’s research into the film reveals that the French title for the film was Oh My God! and in Germany it was In guten händen.

This column for the Capital Times was filed while I was trav­el­ling in the US and fea­tures some med­it­a­tions on the exper­i­ence of watch­ing art­house cinema in New York com­pared with Wellington (at the time). I also reviewed two wit­less com­ed­ies: Hit & Run (star­ring Dax Shepherd) and Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughan in The Watch.

On that 2012 trip, I atten­ded the Telluride Film Festival where the legendary inde­pend­ent film­maker Roger Corman received one of their gold medals. Corman passed away this week­end at the age of 98 and this brief remin­is­cence of watch­ing him being inter­viewed on stage by Leonard Martin is my memori­al. RIP.

Where to watch Hysteria

Aotearoa and Australia Streaming on Netflix

Canada: Streaming on Netflix and Hollywood Suite On Demand

Ireland: Digital rent­al from Apple or Google

USA: Digital rent­al from Amazon or Apple

UK: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon, Google or YouTube

Further listening

Last Friday night I joined sub­scriber ED of Auckland on his nightly radio pro­gramme to talk about the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival (spe­cific­ally Skin of Glass which I watched again on Saturday night, this time with my wife), Shōgun on Disney+ (which I must write about here as it is def­in­itely a recom­men­ded show), and Years and Years, an excel­lent BBC/HBO series from 2019 which is now stream­ing free of charge for Kanopy users.