I cannot tell you how wonderful HYSTERIA is. I enjoyed it immensely. It's intelligent, silly, ribald, moving, and altogether something I recommend.
The cast is wonderful, and the screenplay is about the hypocrisy of high Victorian society and th paradoxes: Rupert Everett is marvelous as the "sexual deviant" son of a newspaper magnate and his wife, played by the wonderful Gemma Jones, who look out for our leading man, High Dancy, who plays Mortimer Granville, a doctor whose intelligence prevents him from working well with ingnorant fools ("It's no wonder that morgues are situated next to hospitals" he cries in resentment), Jonathan Pryce is an arrogant prig whose two daughters represent the "proper Vicotrian maiden" and the suffragette/feminist, played to a tee by Maggie Gyllenhaal. My friend Kim Criswell plays an Italian opera singer suffering from hysteria who has an orgasm needing ro be seen to be believed, but all the ladies waiting for treatment are funny and most interesting. Anna Chancellor, the evil Caroline Bingley from the Colin Firth PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, puts in an appearance as a patient. That I found very funny.
The show would be wonderful on Masterpiece Theatre, but PBS might have a fit over the ribaldry. The scenery and costumes, from the slums to Buckingham Palace, are really excellent. Go see this movie.
It's quite extraordinary, and yet it's so much more than a film about the invention of the vibrator; it's a wonderful study of a period where so much technology and advances are being made in all fields that affect our own lives. It's also quite a wonderful love story.
