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 \u2014 most famously, Montgomery Clift and Viggo Mortensen. But his is surely as much a doyen\u2019s role as King Lear, and here is Anthony Hopkins brandishing the contemplative cigar in Freud\u2019s Last Session.Based on the play by Mark St Germain, Matthew Brown\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Hampstead consulting room in 1939, but the film opens out St Germain\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s).The performances, though, are classy. Goode\u2019s 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\u2019s reconstruction of Freud\u2019s cluttered sanctum is something indeed, each object a clue or a contradiction.\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606In cinemas from June 14<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u2014 most famously, Montgomery Clift and Viggo Mortensen. But his is surely as much a doyen\u2019s role as King<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-120862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120863,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120862\/revisions\/120863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}