Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Sigmund Freud can be played by younger actors — most famously, Montgomery Clift and Viggo Mortensen. But his is surely as much a doyen’s role as King Lear, and here is Anthony Hopkins brandishing the contemplative cigar in Freud’s Last Session.Based on the play by Mark St Germain, Matthew Brown’s film stages a hypothetical debate between Freud and CS Lewis, the Christian polemicist and author of the Narnia books (who was played by Hopkins himself in 1993’s Shadowlands). What a confrontation that might have been: faith versus rationality, theology versus a system of thought that could itself be considered a religion with its own rituals and dogma.The venue is Freud’s Hampstead consulting room in 1939, but the film opens out St Germain’s two-hander in multiple directions: we see Lewis (Matthew Goode) in the trenches of the first world war and strolling with JRR Tolkien; we see an air-raid alert; the Freuds in Vienna, menaced by Nazis; Freud’s daughter and acolyte Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) arguing with colleagues; dream sequences in shades of deepest kitsch. A psychoanalyst might ask: why all the detours and deferrals? The film seems reluctant to get to the nub of the apocryphal meeting.Perhaps it is because, when it comes to the face-off, there is a certain obviousness to the insights: both men are driven by, even in thrall to, diametrically opposed yet somehow parallel beliefs; each lives in ways seemingly at odds with his credo (a liberator of modern sexuality, Freud cannot handle Anna’s).The performances, though, are classy. Goode’s Lewis is dapper, wry, silkily combative, Hopkins effortlessly authoritative but poignant, albeit coasting shamelessly on his arsenal of hmms, hahs and gnomic chuckles.This dusty, polite film is hamstrung by an excess of overproduced period realism, although designer Luciana Arrighi’s reconstruction of Freud’s cluttered sanctum is something indeed, each object a clue or a contradiction.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from June 14
