Augustine

No aspect of filmmaking is less than terrific in AUGUSTINE. The acting, props, camera work and direction are top notch. The tale intrigued me from beginning to a surprising and spectacular ending. There's a scant half dozen COMMENTS so far for this film and I won't pass judgment on the ones that take issue with the substance of the film; i.e., female hysteria, 18th century ideas of treatment and civil liberty, male domination, etc. To me such are besides the point. It is what it is - or rather, was what it was. AUGUSTINE is driven by -no, is exclusively about- two individuals trapped in their settings and stations and the human chemistry that results. AUGUSTINE is the movie that A DANGEROUS METHOD wanted to be. I was fearful that French cinema was descending into Americanized garbage. AUGUSTINE eases such fears.

Plods on AND it's in French, so probably not a good choice to watch if you're not fully awake. The film seemed as if the producers' idea was to convey a dark mood by filming a couple F-stops short of normal illumination. Over all I would not recommend this movie.

A perhaps too subtle view of the famous neurologist Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot and his treatment of the so-called disease, hysteria, at the Salpetriere Hospital. This hospital and asylum in 19th Century Paris was a refuge to over five thousand debilitated and abandoned women. Wished for a more in-depth look. Still, exceedingly better than the more recent movie, 'The Mad Women's Ball'. For a truly comprehensive view of Charcot and his work with hysteria, I suggest reading 'The Dream Collector' by the Pulitzer nominee, R.w. Meek. Maybe someday we will see a film or tv series adaption of this magnificent novel.

Story based on a real person, so big plus. Hysteria is a strange and intriguing state. We want to know more. The film captures the intrigue, which ultimately turns unexpectedly.

This is rather a sensationalised and eroticized rendition of filmmaking loosely based on facts.

Although well acted, well filmed and very intriguing throughout, it nonetheless did not treat the subject material in a way that fully depicted what countless many young women of the day endured: early sexual abuse and it's life-harming effects.

One of the factual details that is notably absent from Winocour's film is the sexual assaults the young Augustine suffered at the hands of an employer with whom she was placed by her mother at age thirteen. The details of her rape do not get mentioned and neither does her trauma,or the information that the attacks began soon after.

From the symptoms of her 'illness,' in this film, the causes or triggers for Augustine's episodes often feature in scenes of animal cruelty. The film does not treat her history of sexual abuse and it has Augustine enter the Salpêtrière at age nineteen, while, in fact, she was fourteen when she began her stay. Very much younger. Still a child.

If the filmmaker had stuck to a factual rendition of how so many girls were sold or traded or sent off to work in situations where they were never protected, never able to protect themselves and where the theme of the day in most of Europe was early sexual abuse of horrific proportions, there may have been a film that explained how generationally women have been exploited, manhandled, marginalised and mistreated almost as point of course.

A hugely wasted opportunity to make an important film.