Special Treatment

Isabelle Huppert is a consummate 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.

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, explaining “I am an empty armour – a numb body but with a brain that still works”, 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.

If Special Treatment sounds as if it will turn into schematic cliché, it doesn’t. 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. –TIFF.net