A Cultural Period Film

If a movie addressing the mental health of a 19th century french female who becomes the speculative study of a trained pyscologist provides adequate substance to keep your attention, then 'Augustine' may be for you. This movie includes a young, little known actress from Bordeaux whose name in real life is Soku. This is her first starring role where she plays the early part of a house servant for a high brow Parisian family, circa 1870. But after an uncontrollable pyscosis attack, she is sent to what at the time was a modern day evaluation clinic.

The movie traces elements of a relationship between the title character and her evaluator who offers something of a microcosmic look at what scientific developments in mental therapy were like back then. No doubt that French advancement in this period, a century after the enlightenment, was one of the world's highest regarded arenas for the study of such sceintific progress. Thus the movie provides minor insight into the professions of the pioneering practicitioners back then.

The era of this movie was years before Freud arrived to emphasize the idea of how early development impacts one's subconscious neural mapping. But similar to Freud's obsession with sexual identity as a predominant factor in understanding a person's cognitive process, so too does Augustine's neurologist Jean-Marco Charcot consider this in his prognosis.

An affection between doctor and patient which is initially presented in bawdy scenes of lustful seduction, soon unfolds into a deeper story as the two characters obscure the boundary between professional integrity and romance.

Something of a similar subject is seen in the newly released Danny Boyle film, 'Trance'.

'Augustine' is the first feature length film by the French director Alice Winocour and recently released in select theaters after having debuted in France last November. In English subtitiles.

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