Irish Film Institute -Unconscious

Unconscious

Director: Joaquin Oristrell

Spain-Germany-Portugal-Italy| 2004. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby digital stereo. 108 min.


A distinctive, sharp and good-looking period comedy, Joaquin Oristrell’s Unconscious is set in Barcelona in 1913 and has great fun pointing up the parallels between psychoanalysis and detective work. The lovely, modern Alma (Leonor Watling) has a problem: her Freud-obsessed husband has disappeared, and her only help is staid, narrow-minded brother-in-law Salvador (Luis Tosar), who distrusts psychoanalysis and everything modern. Discovering a hidden milieu of role-playing masochists, cross-dressing socialites and illicit heroin parlours bubbling under polite Barcelona society, the two sleuths also uncover their own repressed desires, and a secret of truly Freudian proportions. Oristrell uses this open and free period in history as a stage for examining the mysteries of human nature with fun and irreverence.

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