This is my review of Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, which will be published tomorrow in Edge Magazine.
In 2002, I was at the Foreign Theater in San Francisco for the American premiere of Jean Pierre Denis’ Murderous Maids. Denis’ superb film about incest and cold-blooded murder was so disturbing and fraught with treachery and suspense that, by the time Christine started banging her head against her prison-cell wall, I forgot where I was and blurted out to the absent director, “Could you give us a break here!” If you take something like that one head-banging clip – minus any intrigue or suspense – and stretch it out to 109 minutes, you basically got Janos Szasz’s Opium: Diary of a Madwoman.
This Hungarian film scatters its jabs so consistently that it becomes a pointless melee rather than a commentary on the history of mental institutions or a meditation on the connection between genius and insanity. The year is 1913 and Gizella (Kirsti Stubo), a mental patient who believes that the forces of evil have hijacked her brain and body, is subjected to every draconian treatment that a pre-World War I insane asylum could devise. Dr. Josef Brenner (Ulrich Thomsen) is a morphine addict, an aspiring man of letters and sexual deviant whom the asylum welcomes with open arms. Upon entering the gates for the first time, Brenner witnesses the head surgeon performing one of the institution’s many lobotomies in a graphic and gruesome scene involving a mallet and a needle. Later the same day, he meets Gizella for the first time when he finds her in the basement, masturbating and screaming about the Evil One. Brenner cannot help but feel he’s found his true love. Better yet, Gizella is also a writer, one who transcribes every word the Evil One dictates, be it on paper, the floor or the walls, depending on whether she has another of her many shriek-fest fights with the fascist nuns who confiscate her pens. Brenner continuously remarks on how he admires Gizella’s genius but the film gives few examples of the lunatic’s written ravings. We mostly just see her screaming, masturbating or getting strapped to many and sundry racks.
To keep his film from degenerating into gratuitous balderdash, Szasz dresses his sets and cast up in elaborate period décor and costumes. But, to quote Barack Obama, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Opium: Diary of a Madwoman does not give us The Snakepit or Suddenly Last Summer’s searing expose of abuses in the mental-health industry. It doesn’t give us the Marquis de Sade’s trenchant writing and revenge in Quills. It gives nothing on the order of Salieri’s cathartic confession in the loony bin in Amadeus. Scene by scene, it just gives us more reasons to avert our eyes.
Tags: Amadeus, Doug Wright, Jean Pierre Denis, Kirsti Stubo, Murderous Maids, Opium, Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, Quills, Suddenly Last Summer, The Snakepit, Ulrich Thomsen
