A high-class prostitute and a pre-eminent psychoanalyst discover that they share many things in common in the new movie Special Treatment, showing at Kingscliff’s Cinemax Arthouse Theatre starting this week.
Special Treatment is an elegantly shot, rich, witty and sophisticated comedy from veteran writer/director Jeanne Labrune, and a must for fans of Isabelle Huppert, not to mention Belgium’s cult actor/director Bouli Lanners.
Alice (Huppert) plays host to a wild diversity of well-heeled, middle-aged men, all of whom act out or play a series of roles, mostly childish and harmless. Living in an entirely separate world is Xavier (Bouli Lanners), a well-respected psychoanalyst – an uptight, angry, calculating man who has his share of strange and weird patients.
When Xavier’s marriage starts to unravel, a friend of his gives him Alice’s number.
When Alice decides that maybe she has seen enough of the seamy underbelly of French masculinity, she decides to seek professional help. Xavier comes to her as a client, while she “auditions” a series of psychoanalysts. The rest of the film deals with Alice and Xavier as each of them attempts to work through their respective problems.
Isabelle Huppert is a consum-mate risk taker. She continues to star in independent films that deal with controversial subjects, thus pushing herself into new territory and roles that confound and astonish.
In Special Treatment she plays a high-class prostitute against an unlikely backdrop: the world and culture of psychoanalysis.
Writer-director Jeanne Labrune draws fearless parallels between these seemingly different realms. Apart from the strength of Huppert’s remarkable performance (it seems she is capable of anything), Labrune manages to combine the surrealism and play-acting of Belle du jour with a solid dose of bourgeois angst and a feminist desire for escape from prescribed roles.
While odd and unsettling at first (we are not sure exactly what is going on and who is doing what to whom), the film settles into an absorbing and penetrating analysis of unhappiness and people’s attempts to transcend the drudgery and routine of their daily lives.
