Volume 122: Freud's Last Session / Mondo New York
The Voice of Energy Vol. 122
Greetings, all. Hope you are doing okay considering, well, everything.
Today, I bring you reviews of two films — one that is getting a limited release in hopes of scoring some Oscar nominations and one that is finally seeing a DVD release after being out of print for a number of years.
Freud's Last Session (2023, dir. Matt Brown)
The logline is delicious: psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and author C.S. Lewis meet up on one languorous day in England to debate the existence or non-existence of God.
This speculative discussion was first presented in book form by writer Armand Nicholi, Jr. His 2002 work The Question of God — based on a class tough by Nicholi at Harvard — put the writings of Lewis and Freud side-by-side, with annotation and some commentary, remaining blessedly free of bias toward one point of view. The book was subsequently adapted as a PBS series.
Playwright Mark St. Germain dreamed up an actual meeting of these two minds in Freud's Last Session, a stage production that was named Best Play in 2011 by the Off-Broadway Alliance. The two-hander was set in Freud's London home in the hours before England was to officially enter World War II and mere week's before the Austrian was to succumb to oral cancer.
All of that gets carried over to this film adaptation, co-written by St. Germain and director Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity), but the translation from stage to screen gets immediately and infuriatingly muddled.
Brown gifted himself a pair of commanding and captivating actors to play two men whose work continues to cast a long shadow over modern scholarship. Matthew Goode plays Lewis as the ultimate British citizen, with his stiff back and upper lip firmly holding to his Christian beliefs even after surviving the horrors of the First World War and the looming prospect of another. Anthony Hopkins, meanwhile, makes a meal of Freud, rendering him as a prickly old man frustrated that his very active mind is being undercut by his failing health and dependence on morphine to mitigate his mouth pain.
Brown squanders the valiant efforts of these men in the attempt to expand this fictional get-together to cinematic scale. He and St. Germain shoehorn in a wealth of unnecessary drama, much of it concerning Freud's apparent distress at the personal life of his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) who, at the time, was allegedly engaged in a relationship with her assistant Dorothy (Jodi Balfour). It's a constant diversion that adds absolutely nothing to the film.
The filmmakers comport themselves a little better when delving into the lingering effects of Lewis' time on the battlefield and his long relationship with Janie Moore, the mother of a man he served with. The two soldiers made a pact to take care of one another's families if either should be killed. The unfortunate did happen for Janie's son and Lewis did as promised, moving in with the older woman until her passing. The nature of the relationship between Janie and Lewis, and their 27-year age gap, has been the subject of much speculation (he would introduce her as his mother yet rumors abound that they were actually lovers).
St. Germain and Brown allow for some connection of this relationship to Freud's work on the Oedipus complex, even including a moment of the Austrian shouting that Lewis' belief in a deity simply stems from the writer not having an indifferent father. Yet, the writers allow the already thin thread to snap under the weight of the awkward fantasy sequences and bloody sputum from Freud's mouth that follow.
Freud's Last Session opens today in NYC and LA and will expand to theaters around the country in early 2024.
Mondo New York (1988, dir. Harvey Keith)
After years of producing and distributing cult films like Rust Never Sleeps and TunnelVision as well as starting USA Network's long-running after hours programming block Night Flight (since resurrected as a streaming service), Stuart Shapiro left New York City for Brazil in the late ’80s. In his words, he wanted to keep himself and his family safe from the metropolis' growing "cocaine culture." It was in his new home that he was apparently asked by a native Brazilian whether or not it was true that alligators stalked the sewers of the Big Apple.
According to Shapiro, that question was the spark that led him to produce Mondo New York, a celebration of the city's provocative underground arts community that was released by Chris Blackwell's Island subsidiary 4th & B'way in 1988. The film, when it was reviewed, was critically lambasted. Michael Wilmington of the L.A. Times called it "repulsive" and "icky," insisting that, "To call this movie trash doesn't do it justice." It became an instant cult classic in its titular city and around the world through midnight screenings and its various VHS releases.
Mondo New York will have even more opportunities to inspire or revile viewers with its first ever release on DVD and blu-ray from MVD. The new edition treats the film well with a remaster from the original camera negative and a lovely 2K HD transfer. Not taking it to the extremes of 4K was a smart play as the film still retains much of the grain and spottiness present in an original theatrical screening that only adds to the grit and sleaze of the Lower East Side ca. 1988.
It will be fascinating to watch how this plays with modern audiences. Some of the more outlandish moments in the film, like artist Joe Coleman biting the heads off of live mice onstage (right before setting off an array of fireworks under his shirt) or the underground cockfight, will surely press the same discomforting buttons as they did some 35 years ago. The comedy of Charlie Barnett and Rick Aviles, performed to a throng in Washington Square Park, which deals entirely in skin-crawling cultural stereotyping of Japanese tourists, gay men, and others, land with a resounding thud. And the less said about the sequence featuring a staged auction of a Chinese man's daughters the better.
In an interview included on this new release, Shapiro remains steadfast in the core concept of the film, which, he says, dares to ask whether what they are presenting here is art or not. It's a fair question that, in spite of the movie's closing line ("This is art, buddy") doesn't get an easy answer.
To this viewer, Mondo New York and the artists presented within play like an extreme reaction to the changing cultural tides in the city. Multiple performers, especially the great Karen Finley and Ann Magnuson (picture above) bemoan the trend of fellow artists sanitizing their work for commercial and financial gain and the arrival of the nouveau riche. The film then becomes a 82-minute last gasp of a New York that was being systematically pressure washed by then-mayor Ed Koch, complete with interjections from street junkies, sex workers, and longtime residents who throw a familiar lyric on its head. If you can't make it in New York, they say, you can't make it anywhere.
Mondo New York is now available on DVD and as a blu-ray / CD combo from MVD's Rewind Collection
In other news from my desk, I'm winding things down with my time at Paste with this feature about a wonderful young Irish artist Muireann Bradley who plays American folk-blues music and just released an album on Tompkins Square. She just announced she's going to be part of Jools Holland's New Year's Hootenanny, which is exciting. This article also inspired some stranger to lightly chastise me on Bluesky for not properly knowing how to pronounce Muireann's first name. Never change, Internet.
Once I wrap up the other work I've to do for the site, my freelance docket is down to just a lone 300-word weekly show review (and this newsletter, of course). A wild turn of events considering how busy with writing I normally am. Looking forward to the break, honestly. I've got a shop to run and a family to care for, after all.
As I said before, I will be doing a proper year end rundown of my favorite 2023 films for the first newsletter of the new year. But if you want to peer in at what music I loved this year, you can check out my list right here. Feel free to comment if you agree / disagree with my choices or have any questions about any of my picks.
Back again next Friday with a couple of new reviews. As always: Do no harm. Take no shit.
Artwork for this edition is by Tacita Dean whose work is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney through March 3, 2024.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.