Analyze This

The fascinating, changeable Empathy puts psychoanalysis on the couch.

by Sam Adams

Among the 20th century’s more dubious achievements is the transformation of psychotherapy from a branch of medicine to a way of life. Once confined to an analyst’s office, confessions of trauma have become a staple of public life -- an end in themselves, and good entertainment value, to boot. Terms like "neurotic" and "depressed," to say nothing of "schizophrenic," have entered the language so completely that their original meaning has become lost or warped, while the legitimately mental ill have been crowded out by those who feel a Prozac might brighten their day.

At the beginning of Amie Siegel’s Empathy, psychiatric buzzwords flash on the screen, coming ever faster as an electronic tone rises in pitch on the soundtrack: denial, anger, displacement, projection, mania, contempt, amusement, tumbling over each other until the soundtrack sounds like a kettle blowing and only the title is left on screen. The sequence serves as a model for how therapy ought to work, an ever-increasing, sometimes contentious process that finally produces a psychic bond between therapist and patient. But before the credits roll, we’ve already seen that the psychiatrist’s office is home to lies as well as truth. The film opens on an empty chair, as an offscreen voice assuages a patient’s worries. The therapist returns, sits down to continue what seems to have been an interview in progress, and asks the person behind the lens, "You weren’t recording that, were you?" "No," replies the female voice. "We stopped."

Like much in the film, it’s unclear to what extent the moment is staged, and thus how appalled we should be by the filmmaker’s deception. Empathy consistently and deliberately throws its audience off-balance, shifting gears just when we might be finding our footing. Interspersing interviews with therapists with fictional footage of Lia (Gigi Buffington) attending analysis and working out her problems with friends, the film also incorporates snatches of a fake PBS documentary on psychiatry and modern architecture as well as a variety of boundary-eating moments that leave everything else in doubt. Siegel includes footage of actresses, including Buffington, auditioning for the film, but who’s to say those scenes aren’t staged as well, especially when Siegel cuts the footage so the auditioners are having "conversations" with the movie’s fictional characters. Even the PBS-style documentary, which includes an interview with Richard Neutra’s son and business partner Dion, blurs the line between public and private space; UCLA professor Sylvia Lavin discusses the way psychoanalysis affected Neutra’s architecture while breast-feeding an infant. The documentary’s narrator is none other than Lia, an actress who makes a living doing voiceovers. (Speaking of the mind-body split… .)

Just as therapeutic practices have bled into the culture at large, so the "rules" of therapy are not as hard and fast as one might think (or analysands might want). Siegel’s therapists, all older white men, confess freely to sexual fantasies of their female patients and the feeling of power their relationship gives them. (Like good shrinks, they then proceed to deconstruct those feelings.) The only moment of hesitation comes when Siegel, inevitably, turns the camera on herself. When one of her subjects asks about her motivation for making the film, Siegel admits she’s a veteran of therapy herself, but then falls back on academic cliches like "I’m interested in representation." Of what, and to whom? That dodge might be Empathy’s ultimate trick, subverting our expectations just when we think we know what comes next. But the moment still falls flat, and brings the film nearly to a halt. Still, Empathy is the most astonishing, changeable American debut feature since Todd Haynes’ Poison. If you miss it, there’s probably something wrong with you.

Empathy

Written and directed by Amie Siegel A First Run Features/Icarus Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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