The Doctor's Wife
Screened in September 2011
Director: Julian Grant. Screenplay: Julian Grant.
Twitter Capsule:
Corpse Bride meets Frankenstein meets Dangerous Method; dense overlays of feeling, theme, texture, and irony
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| Photo © 2011 XXX |
The character designs and eccentric, lugubrious atmosphere of Julian Grant's film recalls Tim Burton's work, as well as the recent, acclaimed animated short 9,
which later became a feature. Still, The Doctor's Wife has an imagination and shifty emotional tone all its own. The restless, ambitious doctor, so anxiously
immersed in his work that he perches on his haunches in his chair rather than sitting in it, is trying to reverse a dehydrating disease that seems to have
overtaken his spouse; her grip on life seems to diminish by the day, if not by the hour. The wife, a wittily Gothic creation, finds herself disturbingly vulnerable
to feverish scientific speculations that clearly verge on the occult, even though a genuine, affectionate ardor seems to unite the experimenter/husband and patient/wife.
In a good way, we have
trouble working out whether to root for the doctor's Frankensteinian ministrations or whether to cringe at them—or to wonder, even, whether he is making his beloved's
condition actively worse. Have I mentioned that the whole scenario, which builds to a showstopper climax, is scored to an original, Sweeney Toddish
song, and that the wife's fragility is palpable even in the subtle way that the thin voice of her interpreter has been mixed lower than that of her uxorious
but megalomaniacal lover, such that you have to strain a bit to hear her? Fleeting images (cityscapes, rocket packs, zeppelins) endow scenes of this couple's early
courtship, eventual couplehood, and escalating crisis with a brisk, remarkably full imagination, all contained within the economy of one song. In a welcome departure
from the sexlessness and literalism that Burton tends to perpetrate even in
his best movies, The Doctor's Wife furnishes a great deal to see and hear without coaching its audience how to feel about any of it. If David Cronenberg's
A Dangerous Method, also showing at CIFF, handles the dynamics linking the guilt-wracked healer-idolator to the charismatic sufferer-lover with comparable sharpness
and sensuality, I'll be thrilled. That this compressed, tuneful, dexterously layered, and emotionally complex short is the work of a film student makes the future
seem both brighter and darker, in the most exciting possible ways. No Grades for CIFF Shorts