Romantic comedy has a light touch
Film based on the invention of the vibrator pokes gentle fun at Victorian sensibilities
HYSTERIA Starring: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy, Jonathan Pryce Directed by: Tanya Wexler Running time: 100 minutes 14A: Adult themes, sexual situations Rating: ★★★☆☆
Back in Victorian England — a period that the romantic comedy Hysteria asks us to view with a slightly amused air of superiority — medical science had not advanced much past the idea ( now discredited) that ailing patients could be cured with the use of leeches, plus the notion ( still in force) that doctors were not to be questioned about such things.
This makes life difficult for Dr. Mortimer Granville ( Hugh Dancy), a clean- cut young charmer who is also the handsomest physician in all of Britain, not that there’s much competition. Dr. Mortimer believes in the newfangled notion of “germs,” not to mention hygiene, clean bandages and patients’ rights. Needless to say, it takes him a while to get a job.
When he does, it’s with a similarly original thinker, Dr. Robert Dalrymple ( Jonathan Pryce), who tends a clientele of women who have a unique problem, or at least one that demands a unique solution.
In the world of Hysteria — and perhaps this is another of the ideas that hasn’t changed much — the greatest threat to a healthy life is a lack of sexual satisfaction, although it isn’t called that. Rich women who are out of sorts for a variety of invented reasons come to Dr. Dalrymple for one of his special lower- body massages, a manipulation that brings on a “paroxysm” that has at least one recipient shouting “Tally ho!”
This has nothing to do with sex, of course, it being a well- established fact that women cannot feel such pleasures, but nevertheless, Dr. Dalrymple’s waiting room is always filled. Nothing like a good paroxysm to clear away the cobwebs.
Handsome Dr. Granville is a welcome addition to the staff, not in the least because the quality of his paroxysms is first- rate. He also arrives in time to witness a rather convenient cleavage in the newly emerging feminism of the age as represented by Dr. Dalrymple’s daughters: Emily ( Felicity Jones), a demure woman who seems in the need of a good paroxysm herself, if you’ll pardon the insolence, and Charlotte ( Maggie Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who works with the poor and who has, in her smile of complicity, a very ironic sense of remove from the common herd. Hysteria is a film about female sexuality, but it gives Charlotte a sense of political purpose where her erotic life should be. She is, nonetheless, immensely likable and Gyllenhaal — once seen, in the 2002 film Secretary, bending over an office desk to be spanked — manages to convey a twinkling appeal.
Thus the stage is set for an odd- couple romance, spiced with the complication that Dr. Granville eventually develops repetitive stress syndrome in servicing his many clients. This sends him to the home of his friend Edmund St.- John Smythe ( Rupert Everett, hilariously eccentric), an inventor who is willing to adapt a mechanical feather duster into something that will help out: the electric vibrator. It becomes the start of a revolution in sexuality, a sort of bionic finger for the overly stressed, although some of Edmund’s early tries — machines that huff and spark and give off clouds of smoke — are alarming, given their ultimate destination.
Hysteria is based on historical fact — there really was a Dr. Granville and he really did, eventually, invent the vibrator, a muscle relaxer that was adapted into a sort of auto- paroxysmator — but it’s history with a light touch, if you will. First- time director Tanya Wexler cleanses the material of heat, so that the issues of sexual need become the contrivances of light comedy.
Hysteria is a mild update of something Doris Day and Rock Hudson might have made 50 years ago, an artificial love story that is likable without having any edge. Slick and entertaining, it provides many safe chuckles, although you’ll never become hysterical. The vibrator, one would think, deserves something more penetrating.